My thoughts on the paperless office (by Corey Smith)

April 14, 2008 · Filed Under Business, Change, Contributing Authors, Technology 

I am honored to bring you a guest post by a good friend and author, Corey Smith, mastermind behind the business and technology blog, masterthebusiness.com. In his spare time, Corey has also founded several companies to include Resumango and TributeMedia as well as being the Chief Web Architect for Dealer Marketing Systems and Editor-in-Chief at Office Product News. I do hope you enjoy reading this post as much as I did.

There are many reasons why [tag]paperless office[/tag] initiatives fail. I think that in order to truly understand why they fail, we need to understand the difference between how companies use paper and how individuals use paper.

I am a big proponent of the paperless office. I hate paper and wish that it would all go away.

With that said, I have a [tag]printer[/tag] in my [tag]home office[/tag] and I use my [tag]scanner[/tag] to copy documents all the time. I have stacks of paper on my desk and paper in my file cabinets… probably more because I am messy than anything. I love to read a book in print and not from my computer screen.

I should say that the stacks of paper on my desk are the reasons why I don’t like paper. I hate the way the are organized. I hate the way I have to find them. I just hate it.

The reality is, people use paper differently for different reasons. When we talk about paper that we use personally, we need to apply a different standard to that paper than how we use paper in business. We need to jot down notes. We need to highlight the way we are used to. We have been conditioned to expect paper to be the tangible proof that we are doing something. Even my to do list is on a sheet of paper sitting next to my three computer monitors, keyboard and mouse.

A large company is different. It may be efficient enough for me to look through my one file cabinet and find a peice of paper (well, maybe not for me, but for most people), but, it is not practical for a company with many file cabinets to allow each employee that needs access to a file cabinet to have it.

It is like the difference between [tag]Mac[/tag] and [tag]PC[/tag]… you need to have the right tool for the job. I need my PC because so many people use it and I have to understand that technology. I need my Mac because a couple of my hobbies require it and a PC simply won’t do. (Although, if I could choose, I would choose my Mac hands down).

When considering moving to a paperless office and implementing a paperless [tag]workflow[/tag] or even implementing a full blown [tag]document management[/tag] system, we have to realize that there is the right tool for the job. It may never make sense for you to implement a database on your computer to manage your documents, but when we start talking about managing documents in an organization and we need to eliminate those information silos, a paperless document management strategy becomes a critical conversation.

 Corey Smith’s business and technology blog provides a common sense approach to running your business. He also maintains a news feed service for the copier, printer and document management industries.

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