In 1975 Business Week Magazine published an article famously titled “The Office of the Future”. In it, George Pake, the Head of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre, introduced the now well-worn phrase “paperless office.”

Since then there has been a general consensus that it is a good thing to eliminate paper from a business. The arguments for this have included: paper slows down process paper gets lost paper is less secure than digital information paper impacts the environment paper can cause process errors.

Andrew Slapp,
Marketing Program Manager
Fuji Xerox Global Services

Many of these points are irrefutable, but as this article discusses, they are not irrefutable all the time and the argument for and against paper is not as black and white as we are led to believe.

The truth is that in some business processes, printing information to paper is the most convenient and effective option. Even today, most people learn to read from paper. As humans we have a deep and powerful connection with the written word as a physical artefact, and we do often comprehend and manage paper-based information differently to information we receive digitally.

The challenge for modern organisations is how to effectively manage growing repositories of both paper and pixels within a single information and document management strategy.

Consider the following information and document management facts:

• According to the Australian Plantation Products and Paper Industry Council more than 1,619,000 tonnes of copy, printing and writing paper is used each year in Australia alone; that’s approximately 320 billion sheets of paper.

• A content creation and delivery report by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) revealed that 100 percent of interviewed organisations still used paper either for content creation or content storage.

• 487 billion gigabytes of information were created in 2008 according to EMC

• Research by both Gartner and Forrester indicates the size of companies’ data storage doubles each year Over 80 percent of paper and pixel-based enterprise content is semi-structured or unstructured, making it difficult to identify what the content is, let alone extract information from it.

In a recent survey of knowledge workers by AIIM, 72 percent of respondents said it is harder to find information owned by their organisation than web-based information not owned by them .

Drivers of integration

There are three driving forces behind the challenge of building an integrated paper and pixel-based information and document management strategy:

• Are organisations capturing all of the content from multiple channels (i.e. paper, emails, electronic documents) to enable information and knowledge to be found?
• Are organisations effectively managing these documents and information (through a combination of not only technology, but a strategy and the people to support this)?
• Are organisations providing the right means for knowledge workers to access relevant documents and information (Relevant being the key)?

In the AIIM survey, knowledge workers operating in environments where some or all of these questions remain unanswered are highly constrained in performing their job functions. The knowledge worker becomes the lack-of-knowledge worker.

For organisations this means higher operational costs, reduced process efficiency and reduced staff and customer satisfaction.

A study by IDC and sponsored by Xerox further highlights these potential impacts. The study showed that a typical knowledge worker spends approximately 2.7 hours a day looking for documents, 1.62 hours looking for information in those documents and 48 minutes of that time unable to find the information they need, often resulting in more time, cost and risk in recreating information.

One of Fuji Xerox Australia’s health industry customers approached us with this same problem. The question they asked was “How can you better equip my staff to access the knowledge they need to do their jobs more effectively and serve our customers better?”

Our customer was suffering from the following key challenges:

• Multiple channels of content receipt (paper, fax, emails);
• Many records which were “lost” in the information ether;
• Lack of effective tools to search, locate and use organisational knowledge whether it had originated as a paper or pixel-based document;
• When information could be found, often it was inaccurate, irrelevant or out of date.

To help them overcome these information management challenges Fuji Xerox Australia implemented a solution that first separated the customer’s information from the ‘container’ that held it. This effectively meant disregarding whether information was in a physical or electronic format and instead applying information and document management principles to turn it into organisational knowledge.

Fuji Xerox Australia’s solution involved:

• Paper document scanning and electronic document receipt;
• Document classification of all kinds of content: structured, semi-structured and unstructured;
• Data extraction and enrichment services to turn the data into real knowledge; and
• A hosted content management system.

As a result the customer was able to:

• Free staff time to concentrate on improving patient care;
• Reduce costs associated the enhanced with staff productivity;
• Provide users with greater accessibility to records and data with greater accuracy;
• Improve data quality to meet the Federal Government’s requirement for substantiated business cases based on accurate and complete data in return for additional health services funding; and
• Decrease record loss and the associated privacy, health and business risks inherent in poor record keeping and management.

As with all organisations gathering and managing information from multiple sources, it’s not a matter of deciding whether paper or pixels is a superior container for organisational information. Success comes from having a clear information and document management strategy and an integrated solution that turns information into knowledge, now and in the future.

Article written by Andrew Slapp, Marketing Program Manager – Imaging, Document Management and Document Generation, Fuji Xerox Global Services