So, Paperless Office... What Happened?

You would think that after 30 years of planning and promises, we’d all have those paperless offices everybody started dreaming about in the ‘70s. But according to new research by the non-profit Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), anything close to paperlessness remains out of reach for many organizations, and lawyers are to blame.

Well, maybe that’s not fair. To be more accurate, AIIM’s study, “Winning the Paper Wars,” published just a few weeks ago, found that the need for physical signatures on documents and concerns over the legal admissibility of electronic documents are the biggest obstacles to adoption of paperless practices. Let’s blame a fear of lawyers rather than the lawyers themselves.

Among the 562 respondents to AIIM’s survey, three-quarters have active business improvement campaigns they could magnify through paper-free processes, but of those companies, only a quarter are following a specific paper-reducing business policy. Nearly half of respondents have made only 5% progress towards updating the usual processes to paper-free adaptations, and nearly one in five reports using even more paper now than in years past.

Many responding companies justify their pulp fetish by citing legal requirements for paper copies and physical signatures. But AIIM’s report labels those barriers largely illusory, as properly collected and formatted eSignatures and electronic documents are admissible in every state.

While the move to mobile devices among the rank and file is reducing paper according to the report, executives, legal counsel and finance staff who are not yet comfortable with electronic signatures and electronic documents are holding back the move to the paper-free office and the cost-savings it can deliver.

Of course, the move to mobile devices is really only a paper-saver to the extent that employees have unfettered electronic access to the business content they need in the field, the report says. We couldn’t help noticing that the power to provide that access is a key benefit of Accusoft’s Prizm Content Connect, which features an HTML5 document viewer that can deliver high-fidelity viewing and collaboration (and yes, E-Sign-compliant eSignatures) for more than 300 different file types to nearly all browsers on mobile devices today.

The report also said the path to paperless business could be smoothed by broader application of mobile document capture--a capability that’s easy to add to any application with Accusoft tools such as the USB Scanner software development kit. Another Accusoft SDK, ImageGear, enables industry-leading optical character recognition (OCR)--long cited as the bridge technology to a paper-free office--with support for more than 100 languages and other advanced features, such as zone-based processing and image pre-processing.

While it’s not among AIIM’s conclusions, maybe that’s the real answer to “Winning the Paper Wars”: Accusoft.

How paper-free is your company? Share in the comments, below.