I remember talk of the paperless office back in 1986 when I started in IT. This was when modems and data communication were relatively slow, but it was still seen to be the future. Now we have much faster communications, with speeds we could only have dreamt about back then and yet from my experience, it seems that we use more paper now than ever, fuelled by the ever increasing sizes of data that we can store on our systems and by the same faster and cheaper communications.

There also seems to be some legislation necessary to make the paperless office a possibility (at least here in the Netherlands). At my last job, we implemented order confirmation and invoicing via e-mail, only to find that electronic documents weren’t legally binding, so we still had to get the documents faxed or mailed - apparently fax is acceptable, because it creates a hard-copy at the receiving end (I guess no-one had ever heard of things like fax servers when the legislation was made).

There are some things which I still prefer to have paper copies of (bank statements for instance), but in the corporate world I feel there should be much more use of edi instead of printing and posting.

Just my two cents worth.

Best regards,

Martin Gilbert.