Paperless Office? screw it
kissflow.com
kissflow.com
This doesn't mean we do not keep paper, but every receipt, bank statement, and contract gets scanned ( http://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-Instant-Sheet-Fed-Sca... ) and goes into Google Drive.
When scanned we enable the OCR feature so that every item is searchable in Google Drive.
We use the permissions management of Drive to ensure that our accountants can see our bank statements, that our lawyers can see our contracts, and that our staff can each see their HR folder.
The only paper we keep physical copies of are bank statements, receipts and contracts. But as these never need to be accessed unless a dispute or audit requires it, and as they can be found far easier in GDrive, we archive chronologically for storage efficiency and security rather than retrieval efficiency and convenience. Basically... it takes very little space and is stored off-site.
I can't actually imagine running a business any other way.
Now if we can just find something as efficient as a pad on the desk for making temporary notes we'd deal with that last 1%.
Our next goal: Reduce email usage and find collaboration tools that offer better workflow and increased intra-company transparency.
Aside from the scanner itself, their software is very good and optimised for document scanning. It also has built in OCR.
We chose the ScanSnap because:
1. Speed
2. OCR
3. Ability to deal with odd-sized documents (small receipts and larger contracts)
4. Sheet feed (great for the 70 page shareholder agreement documents)
5. Auto-rotate (2 of those pages in that 70 page document were landscape, the rest portrait)
6. Scanning both sides (and discarding blank scans automatically).
7. Easy to service and clean (under heavy use the rollers get mucky in all feed-based scanners)
8. Small footprint when not in use
And what finally sealed it: Linux support.
http://www.micahcarrick.com/scansnap-1500-adf-scanner-in-lin...
We are a Linux shop, and whilst we have a Mac and a Windows machine for testing everyone has a Linux machine.
Please feel free to go all the way.
I'm tempted to go all of the way, but would kick myself hard if I did anything today for convenience that might create risk down the road.
Archiving the paper is a very minimal cost to pay to ensure we don't create that risk.
I should also add, we use grive https://github.com/Grive/grive to sync the entire contents of Google Drive to a local machine and then Tarsnap http://www.tarsnap.com/ to backup that.
We can use that to verify the state of Google Drive over time as well as to restore should anything ever happen to our Google Drive account (those well-documented instances of people getting locked out of their accounts).
On the bright side, I don't see a custom cursor. Thats 90s style ;-)
Noooo-pe (archer style) http://imgur.com/96o4ZvL
In the 90s people would put totally unnecessary ActiveX and Java applets on their sites that would slow down already slow web browsers.
Then came the era of unnecessary "javascripts" downloaded from sites having 1000s of those.
Then came flash, entire websites were made in it, and they were full of bells and whistles that nobody wanted.
Now we have HTML5 and CSS3, and people are still doing stupid unnecessary stuff with it. It never changes, and it never will.
I guess creating gimmicks is just human nature.
http://kissflow.com/wp-content/themes/jarvis_wp/js/SmoothScr...
That way, you can still print/fax if you need to, but now there's an opportunity cost to it. Using the computer is now unambiguously quicker.
And if everyone is "distracted" during a meeting due to tablets, you should probably be asking yourself if the meeting is essential to have. Is whatever topic you're discussing really worth having X people paid Y per hour drop everything they're doing to hash something out that couldn't be done over IM or email? (I find this tack works great with convincing higher-level management who think in dollars and cents)
For ephemeral stuff this is fine, but I'd be really wary of this "digitization solution" for data that matters and what you might want to find some years down the road. This kind of ad-hoc digitization has caused a lot of problems, from documents that simply don't exist anymore, to documents that might exist somewhere but not anywhere anyone can find them. Paper isn't a great solution, but most of the stuff I've actually lost has been digitized stuff on some server or service that disappeared. If you're a bigger company in particular, I'd treat it as an archival problem worth having a proper solution for (perhaps even an in-house archivist whose actual job is managing it).
Vaguely relevant, a cautionary tale that was making the rounds a few years ago: http://wrttn.in/04af1a
It just evolved to be that way, I don't know of any single decision point where we said nope, done with paper. Obviously won't work for every type of organization, but I'm quite happy not having to deal with physical paper. Feels very... quaint.. to have to do so - like staying at a B&B without, say, electricity, where you must churn your own butter.
Now all that said, there is one huge downside to this type of office - everyone looks at their laptops or tablets in meetings. People are constantly distracted. I haven't been in a meeting in months where everyone is focused (though I can't say that was true of paperful offices either). Is it better/worse? I don't know, but if I had to pick between the two, I'd pick no paper every time.
Trust me when I say most of the people pretending to stare at old fashioned paper are spacing out, thinking about the weekend, shopping lists, daydreaming, etc.
Its not more distracted, its more honest. This is a prime opportunity to improve business procedures and make more money. If its possible to be honest that most meetings are a waste of time, abolish them.
I've spent a lot of time at primate dominance rituals, at slow verbal readings of a previously distributed email/powerpoint, at what amounts to a dramatic presentation with poor stagecraft that should have been done by distributing a professionally edited video, the worlds least efficient way to distribute work material, a very inefficient and expensive way to ensure boring forms are filled out (too beta/lazy to enforce your workers actually work? make them work in a conference room and call it a meeting). I've been to a couple real meetings in my life, mostly brainstorming sessions, but the rest have been a waste of time.
What we need is a meetingless office not a paperless office. Its trivial to waste $10000 worth of aggregate labor and travel budget for a meeting, but really hard to blow $10000 worth of paper in an hour unless you've got a printing press instead of a stereotypical laser printer.
In my experience, it is more distracted. When someone is deep in the mental zone of authoring an email, or caught up in an IM chat, and I just need to ask them if they agree with a technical decision or not, they are definitely too distracted to be effective.
| Trust me when I say most of the people pretending to stare at old fashioned paper are spacing out, thinking about the weekend, shopping lists, daydreaming, etc.
Yes, that is definitely human nature - but it's far easier (IMO) to get someone's attention from a daydream than it is from a screen of blinking notifications.
| What we need is a meetingless office not a paperless office.
I disagree. There are times and places for meetings. Sure, frequent meetings are painful and need to be culled back, but there are just times that you need to sit down with real people and talk through something.
I wouldn't put my company's documents in the cloud. Google, are you kidding me? Then again most of my work is security orientated. So my experience might differ.
Second, as a developer, I wouldn't give-up pen and paper for doing mathematics and for doodling algorithms and attempts at solving daily problems. I tried to do it on the computer a lot of times but it's just a waste of time and I always end-up focusing on the tools rather on the problem at hand.
From my experience these paperless speeches come from SUV drivers that read about it in this months Corporate Magazine's issue.
Now, unleash the downvotes!
Your point about focusing too much on the tools when going digital is important. Often I get sucked into some fancy ToDo app for my short lists of personal tasks. Down I go into the rabbit hole of productivity apps and soon enough I realize I should have just scribbled it on a piece of paper and be done with it instead of buying into a whole ecosystem of digital tools to manage tasks that will be thought of, recorded and completed in minutes or hours.
It doesn't have to be physical. I can just store documents on a server that I own and have control over. That still doesn't make it secure because I have to watchout for 0-days and what not. And even then it wouldn't be secure.
But at least I have controllability and observability. I can access and modify them anytime I want to and I also know when someone had unauthorized access to them.
Of course this is not entirely true in Mission Impossible like scenarios. And I'm not saying everyone should do what I do.
But I profundly dislike the superior attitude in articles such as these where the author tells me what to do and asks me why I'm not doing it yet.
So I use paper plenty, I just generally don't store it
Not sure what he means. My office, as most I know nowadays, are already 99% paperless. The only paper around is some scratchpad I like to scribble ideas on.
Now if you work in accounting (with all receipts and stuff) or in law this might be different, but for the regular office, and especially IT? We're there.
From my experience running a web design and development company is that paper files a lot like email archives are kept but not accessed. I have 1 drawer filled with paper files related to a handful of my clients, and I can't say I access them enough to warrant keeping or even scanning them (akin to moving your paper files to a storage locker). Mostly they become paper "todos" which need to be kept so I can address them later.
I had the same experience when I moved from Thunderbird to GMail. At first I was concerned I wouldn't have easy access to my dozens and dozens of archived email folders, diligently filled with all client emails from the past 5+ years. Fast forward to 3 months of using Gmail and I can count on one hand the number of times I booted up Thunderbird to find an old email.
Papers, notes, files and (even)digital archives are safety blankets, future tasks and baggage weighing us down and keeping us from the important work at hand.
Don't go paperless, go archive-less.
(edited to add my wife had some stock brokerage thing that needed faxing, and we discovered the hard way there's predatory faxing "services" out there which will send your fax... for $1 a page, and of course the idiot form is 20 pages long, so there goes $10 vs a couple cents if we mailed it)
In the heyday of modems perhaps 20 years ago, this was "normal" if you already had a scanner, you could send faxes using most higher end modems, like 14.4 and faster. So this has been technologically obsolete as an authentication system for a couple decades.
I believe the belief comes from the bad old days of itemized long distance billing. AT&T will send a bill to me proving I sent "something" to them so if they claim I didn't, then produce what they claim I sent. Sorta registered mail service, kind of. But itemized long distance billing is dead.
For HN readers too young to know what itemized long distance billing is, before the modern era of "all minutes are free" you'd seriously, no kidding, get a paper bill listing all your interLATA phone calls and what they cost.
Wash DC 202 123-4567 5 minutes daytime rate subtotal $10
The kind of thing seen above.
Paperless office is not yet there, but it is always improving. For example, I am changing my bank and my main complain against my previous bank is that it was too much paper.