The Desire For a Paperless Office - Part 2

In our last post, we mentioned an article posted on TechLeaders 2012's website called, "Achieving the Paperless Office." We reviewed what it means to be a paperless office and now we'd like to move on to the difficulties and the opportunities associated within this utopian paperless environment!

In the article, there are some examples of how many companies have already begun the paperless process:

• Financial systems replaced general ledgers
• Databases replaced rolodexes and index cards
• Email replaced traditional letters and faxes
• Electronic calendars replaced day planners and desktop calendars
• Internet is replacing encyclopedias, phone books and much more

We can see this working already within our office right now. We send Outlook calendar invites to each other through our email with our contacts contained with our database. That's three of the five right there. Although these five items are a great start, there are other hurdles to cross. The article goes on to discuss how becoming more efficient can create sometimes create more of a paper trail. You also run into problems when a process (like signing up for an account in a bank) isn't created with the paperless office in mind. To make the switch requires a lot of time and effort on the company's part.

That's where we think educating the public on digital signatures helps out. You can create processes within your office knowing that there are technologies out there that can help you. Where have you begun to move towards a paperless office?

In our next post we'll talk through another article that has some other ideas for moving towards the paperless office. Keep an eye out!