The state of paperlessness

As personal computers began to spread throughout businesses in the 80s one of the predicted benefits was the elimination of paper.

It soon became obvious that computers were in fact better at generating paper documentation than at eliminating it, but the spread of networks, and especially the Internet, once again changed things. Not only could we store data in the computer, we could communicate it easily and efficiently. So where are we on all this? How has the computer industry fared at creating efficiencies by eliminating paper?

Like I said, networks and the Internet have been the key in this regard--with e-mail as the single most important development. My wife is an accountant for a company with a lot of international business, and the fact that she can easily communicate through e-mail with people all over the world not only makes her job easier, it makes it possible. But there are aspects to her job that still require dealing with aggravating amounts of paper, and they are good examples of how the computer industry has failed in many ways. My wife says that many of her company's customers, especially abroad, insist on paper records in cases where it brings no value--even in cases where accepting an Excel spreadsheet would make the records even more original. The end result is that they have to Fedex a piece of paper (that's right, the client won't even accept a fax) to Indonesia at an absurd cost which ends up delaying billing.

And even some big companies haven't figured it out. Let's say your company has American Express Corporate cards. It would be nice, for your own internal accounting purposes, to be able to access the statements electronically. There are all kinds of ways this could be done. Ultimately, I envision a standard XML schema for Amex statements or perhaps for credit card statements generally. But in the meantime it would just be nice to be able to get an Excel file with all the transactions with account numbers and dates and everything else that appears on the statements. Currently they don't do this--you can get an HTML view of a statement, but it's hardly a replacement.

This brings up the related issue that--and I know this is hard for some of us to accept--not everyone uses computers. Consider that banks can deal much more cheaply and efficiently with a customer electronically, but it's still necessary to be able to send paper statements and cancelled checks. It's going to be a long, long time before this sort of paper legacy goes away.

There are some aspects of business that have been more fully explored for automation, supply chain being the best example. Supply chain automation is an old dream and people have been working on it since long before the Internet became commercialized. In fact, back around 1990 my boss and I talked about writing software to do it.

The key to it has always been effective standards for document formats, better known as EDI or electronic data interchange. It was the work on EDI format standardization at ANSI that got me and my boss excited. Products based on some of this work are still in use, but they never took off except in private arrangements among large corporations.

Then XML came along, and immediately it was obvious that it would be the vehicle around which effective EDI formats would be developed. I won't get into the fight over these standards, which has been covered extensively here on Tech Update.

Others feel that non-proprietary standards are essential here; I think that's less important than getting something that works well and is accessible to the majority of the market. If that need is better served by Microsoft's BizTalk and consortiums like RosettaNet, it wouldn't be the first time the industry was well-served by proprietary developers.

What do you think it will take to eliminate paper? Share your thoughts in our TalkBack forum, or drop Larry a line.