Communications of the ACM
Why Tech Can't Break the Hold of Paper
Credit: The Backgate
Talk of a paperless office has been around for well over 40 years, and automation has displaced paper from some activities. But the office is "the last corporate holdout to the automation tide that has swept through the factory and the accounting department," Business Week said in 1975. That trend shows no sign of changing.
Demand for paper is at an all-time high. Finnish paper provider Foex predicts that the global paper market could reach a new record of 400 million tons in 2012.
While not all office-based, the mountain of paper is steep, and apparently not lessened by the rise of tablets, smartphones, laptops, high-speed wireless broadband, high capacity storage, and other technologies.
Being genuinely paperless is expensive. "We've worked out what it would cost — not just to reduce the amount of paper we're producing every day but to wipe it out," says Caroline Kimbell, head of licensing at the National Archives, the official archive of the UK government. "It came to £259 million [U.S. $400 million] to reduce the number of boxes we're producing in the reading room just by 20%. We have got nowhere near that amount of money — neither does the whole private sector put together in this sphere."
View a video on the persistence of paper.
From BBC News
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