The paperless office: Myth or reality?

In a 1975 Business Week article, scientist Vincent E. Giuliano predicted the demise of paper in the office. It hasn’t happened.

My colleagues in the print and paper industry have used this fact to build the “myth of the paperless office”. Whenever the concept of the paperless office is raised, my print industry colleagues smile knowingly and say:“It’s a myth, they (people like me) have been saying that for 40 years,” followed by “We are now printing more than ever”.

I’m not going to get drawn on data and trends that prove one thing or another. We can all find data that proves our position. The true position is always somewhere in between the two extremes and that’s the problem.

There is a great book by business consultant Daniel Burrus about predicting how businesses may operate in the future: Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible. There are two things that I would like to highlight from this book:

• The new technology rarely replaces the old. They both survive. However the market share between the two will shift over time in favour of the new technology. At some point the new technology will become the mainstream and the old will become niche.
• There are hard trends and soft trends. We need to look at the hard trends to know what will happen and reduce the impact of the soft trends.

I’d suggest reading the book to understand the difference. In a nutshell, hard trends are invariant, they will happen and are robust to changes in environment; soft trends may be happening now but could, with some changes in behaviour or environment, go away.

My colleagues in the print industry now recognise that digital is on the rise and rather than standing on the premise that paperless is a myth, they are changing the meaning of paperless from ‘no paper’ to ‘less paper’. To be honest this is a good view and matches point one above. However we then get into the question of how fast the market share will shift from one to the other. This brings us to point two and the hard trends that we see that are now accelerating the shift in market share.

I think we should watch the following hard trends to predict the shift in market share from old to new:

• Tablets are the perfect form factor to replace documents and they are on the rise and are now everywhere. The iPad specifically was the first catalyst for the growth in digital.
• Tablets need to get closer to print resolutions on the device screens. Again, Apple created the current trend to increase the pixels per inch of all devices. This means the user doesn’t have to zoom and pan.
• Battery life: Again Apple and other devices are now chasing battery life and huge advances are being made in battery technology.
• Input methods: There are times where you want to scribble and take notes. Currently you switch to paper when you want to do that but Stylus technology is the next improvement we will see.
• Processor and memory will keep on growing: As processor power and memory grow, the user experience will get closer to and surpass that of working on paper. There is still an emotional connection with paper and for that to change in the majority of users the user experience has to get much better.
• People are working longer and therefore there are people in the workforce who like paper and will be reluctant to change. Jumping to the “Minecraft” generation of the future is something that won’t happen soon and therefore for it to accelerate there will need to be a bridging technology between the two worlds. This generation will eventually be the majority though and they will see the digital technology of today as nostalgic, not paper and pen.
• The cost of digital solutions on the environment will reduce (see battery life above) and will become a clear way to reduce a company’s environmental foot print.
• The cost savings of digital solutions will become compelling in all enterprises (if they aren’t already now) and more and more companies will choose to move to digital.

That’s a lot of trends in favour of the new technology and they will all help to accelerate the move from old to new. I think the ‘we are printing more than ever’ is a soft trend that will be dispelled by the trends above. The move from the old to the new has started and there are a lot of catalysts and trends driving it faster than ever. It’s true that it hasn’t happened in the last 40 years, but the above trends were not there — the less paper office is here — the only question is how quickly paper will become niche.