Saturday, July 5, 2008

Paperless Office: A Hit or Myth


Papers is one man's greatest inventions. It was invented hundreds of years ago and has been in use ever since then. In olden days the books were written using hands and then came the print technology and the books were printed and published.

Then came the office environment were paper played a major role. So in short man was in use of papers for more than three centuries. In the 21 st century we have witnessed the digital world and digital life style grow in leaps and bounds. So why aren't we leaving the trees to live in peace and turn our face towards the computers, laptops, the internet, emails, phone, electronic faxes. So despite having such a huge list sources for communications and storing and processing raw data and information we still depend on papers. According to recent surveys a normal Indian company prints papers that would equal 15 to 20 million trees. Thats really huge. Just think how much carbon dioxide these trees might have absorbed and made the environment a lot more cleaner and greener. Some critics do maintain that to set up a paperless office is almost impossible. But thats why I am writing this article on my blog to bring about that change.

To bring about a paperless office cannot happen overnight. It should be a slow and gradual process. It is because an average Indian youth today has seen a computer and heard about and used an internet only when he was into his teens. Thats because India witnessed the IT revolution much later than countries like U.S.A, Japan etc. So we were brought up using paper all our lives. So do you think is it possible for an average Indian to cope with and get adjusted to the paperless office. I don't think so but is actually possible. So how are we going to achieve it? Below you can read a solution of the same.

Every office should encourage the usage of the electronic media compared to that of the paper media. Thy should limit the paper that they provide to the employees. Employees should also understand their responsibility as a human being and give their best in bringing up a paperless office. But th actual paperless office is sure not to be the thing of the recent future. It is a gradual process which can be achieved with the company, government and the individual citizens all working together in creating one.

Krish image




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of the things we do in our office to discourage people from printing documents is to not connect the network printer to the network. Instead, people have to carry their laptops and connect to the printer directly in order to print.

Pixily, our firm is officially launching our paper document digitization and aggregation service on July 15th. You mail-in your documents in pre-paid envelopes at least once a month and we scan the documents into your account. You can search, share and download them from anywhere. If you want to learn more and sign up go to: http://blog.pixily.com/blog/2008/06/01/what-is-pixily-how-can-i-sign-up/

kiran sawhney said...

i agree to this concept specially so that less trees are cut.
To do my bit for the environment, I carry my own shopping bag of cloth and avoid taking the plastic ones, try to use minimum paper.
One thing that I still enjoy is reading a book rather than reading the e version of the same. A book in hand is a different feel all together.
These days we read so much over internet that reading a book becomes a different experience.