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.

I have been thinking a lot about whether DMS will have a place in the paperless office of the future, or will the likes of Google’s and Microsoft’s search engine tools replace the need for structured data? I mean look at WordPress as an example. I just write, tag my articles, and publish. I don’t worry about where they are stored because I can always go back and find them using search tools. This is a much different feel than our older HTML based websites.

Think about this… DMS for the copier dealer has been the “natural lead-in” from a copier-based sales mentality, or so the experts say. Presumably it is a bridged sales strategy allowing the those reps focused on hardware to feel a little like they understand they are still working with documents. Not saying it can’t be done, but that’s a tight corner to take. Most dealers are selling pages - a far different industry than selling software. The company I work with even struggles with this culture change on a daily basis as we blend into a consultative and strategic mindset. It is a slow progression we started many years ago, and the old habits still creep back in.

So what about the solution itself we are selling? Why has DMS or even CMS become such a buzz word? Does it have a shelf life or is it a technology that has a shelf life of 1 or 2 decades, much like the VCR tape?

I suppose it would have to depend on the applications you might expect. For instance, when we started our DMS conversion several years ago, we had the mindset to eliminate paper filing rooms and process paper documents much faster. It seemed like a wise direction at the time.

Fast forward a few years and enter a new ERP system, a new phone system, an overhauled infrastructure and even a second DMS suite (the first one couldn’t cut it). We now find that there is a need to store files, but there are considerably less paper documents to store. Why is this? Is the paperless office coming true?

Not so much. We have found ways to create less paperwork through process improvement and have also found that we don’t need to keep as much (there was a lot of duplication going on). And one of the most profound things my staff has discovered over the past 3 months is just how much of an impact a closely aligned ERP system can have on paper-reduction; paper doesn’t need to exist as much on the outside of our ERP system as it did in the other.

We are seeing some reductions in the arena of paper production, but does this in and of itself indicate the demise of DMS? After thinking and working with our solution there are 2 reasons I don’t think DMS is or will be dead anytime in the near future.

The rise of Business Process Automation (BPA) tools (sometimes referred to as workflow automation). For instance, the partner we chose had a vision 4-5 years ago that DMS was only a bucket, if you will. It held the documents you collected (paper or otherwise). Now they have launched their comprehensive BPA tools that we are expecting to have a significant ripple effect throughout our organization.

The second reason for DMS sustainability is simply lack of integration in the SMB between supplier, vendor, and customer. While there are systems that allow us access to more information than we ever had before, many times these disparate systems are unconnected from one another; we find ourselves moving from system to system in an attempt to pull information.

To be sure, technology is becoming cheaper and cheaper by the day, and the price tag on integration doesn’t scare so many people as it did due to falling costs and better interoperability standards. But it is unreasonable in the near future to think the seeds of change will grow so quickly as to change the simple fact that to conduct business documents (electronic or otherwise) must flow between companies and customers. Just look at the sales process as 1 example (vendor quote, customer PO, vendor receipt, customer receipt, vendor invoice, etc.).

 DMS isn’t going anywhere in the near term. There are a lot of things that will change in the next decade, and I do not pretend to know what or how those changes will impact DMS specifically. I do know people will be people and software will continue to evolve and change. Unlike the VCR tape, software is simple a collection of electrons in a given order; they can be arranged and re-arranged innumerable times producing new code to solve new problems. As long as the people designing the code stay focused on the needs of their customers and developing trend in the document space, document solutions will remain relevant and needed to help people make sense out of the ever-increasing volume of documents.