Have You Heard The One About The Paperless Office?
Posted by Alan Joch | July 9, 2009
[Editor's Note: Paige Coverage is on vacation.]
No joke--the long-awaited and much-maligned Paperless Office may finally be a reality. Once an object of ridicule because of the mountains of paper that never seemed to shrink, the idea's gaining new respect because of the most compelling reason of all: It can save money.
The upshot is that MFPs will be sold less for their hard-copy talents and more for their abilities for document imaging and then routing digital records to file servers, e-mail applications and workflow systems.
One sign that electronic documents are going mainstream is the interest they're generating among SMBs. More than four-fifths of the SMBs surveyed recently by bMighty.com said document-imaging systems offer significant value, leading more than half to say they intend to implement a document-imaging solution in the next 12 months.
The federal government's National Labor Relations Board is one organization that's seeing concrete benefits from a paperless workplace.
"Until a couple of years ago, we were pretty much a paper-based operation," CIO Richard Westfield tells me. "When attorneys sent us documents they would come into the office as paper, through the fax or snail-mail."
But then the NLRB launched an e-filing initiative that has since brought the amount of digital documents to about 30 percent of the agency's total. He expects that percentage to rise to as high as 90 percent in two or three more years. "We now can centralize information so people can get at it wherever they are," he explains. "Information isn't scattered all over the place."
