On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 6:33 PM, PeterK <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> The concept of a 'paperless office' has been around for at least 35 years,
> since British-American information scientist, Frederick Wilfrid, first
> envisioned it in 1978 in his book 'Towards Paperless Information Systems'.
> More than three decades on, in the midst of the information age, you would
> think we would be there by now - but far from it.
>
> Research conducted by printer firm Epson has revealed that physical page is
> still a central part of daily office life. The survey of over 3,600
> European employees found that 83% felt the ‘paperless office is
> unrealistic’.
>

This comes up every couple of years or so, and there are lots of reasons
given as to why people think it's the case.

This recent piece is from the UK and I'd like ot see some of the
demographics of the respondents to better understand the data (percentages)
reported.

In part, I think SOME in the UK who are old enough to know the story about
the Domesday Book, and what happened with it was 'digitized' may help color
their attitudes about eliminating paper records.

I also have seen that depending on the age of the organization, the
industry segment it is in, the average age of its employees and other
factors... there are differing opinions about the need to cling to legacy
paper, or even generate paper records under current business models.

I've been into businesses that have only existed for 5-10 years in the high
tech industry, where most of the employees and managers are Gen-Xers and
millennials and you don't see many file cabinets... and I doubt they have
boxes of records being sent to central file repositories, or off-site
commercial providers.  What they have is almost all generated and/or
received in native digital form, is stored that way, and their repositories
are either server farms or the Cloud.

So will we EVER see the paperless office? My opinion is we're already
seeing it in some industry segments and in some newer organizations... and
in many other, we are seeing "less paper intense processes", but I doubt
there will be large-scale changes in highly regulated industry segments, or
in legal and finance for along time.

Things like the MGRD are pushing for the Feds to eliminate paper, even in
Permanent records, but the logic of that is being questioned in many cases-
there is insufficient staff and funding resources to achieve some of this,
especially in the time table proposed.  And I don't think a lot of hard
thinking went into the suggestion that microfilm (already generated) be
converted to digital forms, given the film has an LE500, and if
sufficiently indexed, could be located and viewed under the limited use it
has.  There's no need to "periodically migrate and convert these images to
retain persistent access", if properly stored.

Larry

-- 
Larry
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*----Lawrence J. MedinaDanville, CARIM Professional since 1972*

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