Business In Terms Of Paperless Office example essay topic

There has been a vision about an idea called the "paperless office" since the 1980's on how it would impact the business world. The main idea of the paperless office is to conduct business transactions without sorting memos, reports, or anything that is printed on paper. Many considered the potential advantages of having personal computers in every house in the future. People are fascinated by the power of computers and by the new opportunities they provide. People started to think of how computers will affect the future. A paperless society was the most obvious vision.

First, people were tired of papers overloading their offices, and secondly they became more conscious about the environment aspects. The future looked so bright back then. No more paper clutter plus no more trees being cut just for the paper. Everything, including books, will be stored on disks and other electronic media. There are Web-based business forms that are completed and stored entirely online. More importantly, the data contained in the forms, including signatures, can be processed in databases to create detailed online financial reports.

E-mail is without a doubt, the Internet's most popular application. In my opinion, it is among the first services users get hooked to when they log on to the Internet. For the past few years, people have started E-mailing everything from letters to greeting cards to making the world a smaller place. As the use of E-mail started, should not the amount of mail being sent through the postal system decline?

The relationship between the two is more complicated than many people realize. For example, America Online (AOL), a provider of Internet access to at least 28 million subscribers around the world, facilitates billions of e-mail exchanges. Yet, the company is also the fastest-growing user of direct mail in the United States. Where did they find these subscribers?

It did so by pooling together direct mail lists and using the trusted and reliable postal system to ship several million CDs containing its free software to potential customers. Each time AOL upgrades its software this flooding of direct mail continues, offering an unexpected gift to the postal service. Statistics shows, "the average U.S. executive wastes six weeks per year retrieving misplaced information on desks or in files. At a salary of $75,000 per year, this would translate to 12.3 percent of total earnings. An average American employee uses 250 pounds of paper annually.

When paperwork is mishandled, it takes away from the company's ability to service customers, increase sales, and improve the bottom line. Office workers spend 40 - 60% of their time working with paper. Over 800 million pages are created from computer printouts per day, enough to fill a file drawer 225 miles long. The average American gets 49,060 pieces of mail in a lifetime, one third of it junk. Despite visions of a paperless office, most experts believe that 95% of all information is still transmitted using paper. Workers say they print an average of 32 pages a day from the Internet".

Today, we have many enabling technologies of the paperless office. Let's start from the most basic, yet innovating device, which in my opinion sparked the idea of the paperless office: A computer. "With software such as The Computer Filing Cabinet (CFC), it has a main directory (the database) and then sub-directories. Directories can be nested to N levels. Folders within directories can be located through its specific path in the same way that files are found on Windows Explorer". A document may consist of one or more pages.

Each document may have multiple indexes, which allows for easy retrieval. Documents can be scanned or imported as TIFF or JPEG images. They are labeled manually, by OCR, or by barcode. The documents are located by searching the various indexes and can then be displayed, printed, faxed or emailed.

The size of an average scanned page is approximately 40-45 K. Approximately 12,000 to 15,000 pages can be stored on a single CD-ROM. All CFC turnkey systems include a CD-R (writer) for storing and backing up documents. Documents are saved directly on the hard drive and waits for backup and storage to a CD-ROM. The system automatically creates storage volumes the size of a single CD. The basic CFC turnkey system comes with the ability to handle 30 CD's or about 450,000 documents for nearly instant recall. All that can be done with software installed in a computer.

The Palm Pilot is another device that plays a big roll in the paperless office. Handheld products range from mini-notebooks that are compact versions of traditional laptops, to palm-sized units that fit in your shirt pocket. Some have keyboards, while others operate with the touch of a stylus (pen). Some provide full wireless applications; some are designed to meet only basic organizing functions. They all exist to serve those that conduct at least some of their business away from the home office.

This can eliminate the use of day planner, address book, and journals. Dentists today are also getting involved with paperless office. "There is a recent developed product for the dental industry that gives dental office the ability to get paid faster for their services, increase practice's collection effectiveness, and reduced rejections. This product is Dentrix. You can access a patient's chart; enter information; attach x-rays, period charts, and other images; send claims to batch and send electronically all from within DENTRIX". Sending a claim is easy, it only takes two simple steps: "1.

Prepare the claim: From within the Ledger, enter a procedure like you always do and click on the "INS" button. 2. Send the claim: In the Office Manager, click on the yellow lightning bolt button and your claims are sent electronically. It is that simple and saves on stamps, envelopes, forms, paper, wear-and-tear on your expensive laser printers, and most important, you " ll save staff time and increase productivity."Ten years ago, technology experts predicted that the new Internet would change the way of dealing business in terms of paperless office. People would be able to share ideas all over the world. Large-scale businesses would run from homes, and without the need for paper, forests would be saved.

Technology was finally going to work to save the planet". Paper documents, however, are more common than ever. If anything, the Internet has encouraged the use of more paper because in 1996, according to the Gartner Group, "U.S. businesses used 800 billion documents. By 2000", the number was up to 1.2 trillion. A book called, "The Myth of the Paperless Office", by two social scientists, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper mentions; paper has a unique set of "affordances", qualities that permit specific kinds of uses. "Paper is tangible; one can pick up a document, flip through it, read it, and quickly get a sense of it.

Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it's tailor able: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text". Digital documents, of course, have their own affordances. They can be easily searched, shared, stored, accessed remotely, and linked to other relevant material.

But they lack the affordances that really matter to a group of people working together on a report. Sellen and Harper write: "Because paper is a physical embodiment of information, actions performed in relation to paper are, to a large extent, made visible to one's colleagues. Reviewers sitting around a desk could tell whether a colleague was turning toward or away from a report; whether she was flicking through it or setting it aside. Contrast this with watching someone across a desk looking at a document on a laptop. What are they looking at? Where in the document are they?

Are they really reading their e-mail? Knowing these things is important because they help a group coordinate its discussions and reach a shared understanding of what is being discussed". I believe a paperless office will not be successful simply because, computers are not as reliable as hardcopies. Even the best systems crash and information is lost. Eyes can be damaged or get achy if reading a screen all day.

People are trying to minimize that as much a possible. Today, schools, and the entertainment industry are expanding the use of World Wide Web, posting messages, announcements, assignments, quizzes, and surveys, however, hardcopies are much more formal. In my opinion, people will always take hardcopies more seriously than online applications. I believe a combination of hardcopy and electronic is the only option. n.