Paperless Society

May 29th, 2010 by admin

As a society we need to move forward with paperless technology. It isn’t just a matter of giving everyone a scanner and in celebrating because we are “paperless”. Being paperless is about more than just scanning in documents and storing them on a hard drive. Being paperless is about more than that. Being paperless is about keeping documents into digital format from creation through distribution. There is no real value in scanning in a piece of paper and then throwing it away. You might gain something in storage space and in ease of retrieval but you haven’t reduced the amount of paper in the world. Previously that paper would be in a file cabinet, now it’s in the trash. That isn’t a real good trade-off.

I’m not saying that there is no advantage to scanning documents. But that’s really not what a paperless society is about. We need ways of avoiding paper in the first place. We need ways of producing, distributing and authenticating documents that do not involve cutting down trees.The technology for doing this is readily available. But it requires a cultural shift that hasn’t happened yet. If we want to truly see the benefits of automation we are going to have to to change how we approach paper. We are going to have to to focus on keeping things in electronic format.

The new wave of digital readers will probably help with this. Once people get used to being able to read documents without printing them out we will take a huge step forward. There is significant gains to be made by companies put effort into automating their digital processes and move away from dealing with paper and other antiquated relics.

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