It's official: The paperless office, predicted for more than 30 years, hasn't happened. Less paper? Today's offices use more. Paper use at home is skyrocketing too, and printer sales are way up. It wasn't supposed to be this way.
When a Business Week story in June 1975 touted the "paperless office" as the way of the future, pundits everywhere took the bait. After all, paper seemed so passé, so bland, so 1850.
John Maine, now a 30-year veteran of the paper industry and vice-president of American pulp and paper consulting firm RISI, admits he was as wide-eyed as anyone back then about the expected paperless revolution.
"I was one of the ones making those prognostications. Instead, we had very rapid growth in paper use back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. We actually started using more paper, because of technology demands for printing," Mr. Maine said.
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But the tide is turning. While paper still reigns supreme, with North American office workers each using roughly 60 kilograms of copy paper per year, Mr. Maine's research shows paper use at offices peaked in 1999 and has subsided about 6 per cent since then.
Change is slow, but it is happening. The last frontier is the home office, where Mr. Main says increasing penetration of Internet access has fuelled a greater demand for printing. According to marketing information company NPD Group Canada, retail sales of inkjet printers in Canada are rising, up 7 per cent from last year, while sales of home laser printers, long seen as a market benchmark, are up more than 40 per cent in the same period. It's a trend that has been steadily on the increase for at least 10 years now, something which NPD technology director Darrel Rice says is proof that paper certainly isn't going down without a fight.
"I wouldn't say the paperless office is dead -- I think it just hasn't materialized as quickly as people thought it would," Mr. Rice said.
But in Saskatchewan, at the law office of Behiel, Munkler & Will, partner Aaron Behiel has started to turn the battle in favour of the digital camp.
The office in Humboldt, Sask., has taken 20,000 documents and files, scanned them into a digital format and placed them onto computer hard drives. The files are essentially just photographic copies -- they can't be manipulated at all -- but the system saves time and is a step toward freeing the company of the paper addiction afflicting most legal offices.
Mr. Behiel has also converted many document processes -- such as the filling out of land survey forms, wills and various tax templates -- to an electronic format, speeding up those procedures and allowing lawyers to handle larger case loads and increasing overall revenue.
Going digital has been a big step for the 60-year-old law firm, but Mr. Behiel believes his firm's success is setting a good example for the rest of the law industry.
"A lot of law firms are now starting to go this route, and it never used to be that way. I would like to see the legal profession move even further to reduce paper," he said.
Still, the changes are deliberately small in an industry Mr. Behiel says is still not quite ready to abandon paper. "A law office wastes so much paper, but I don't see paper use disappearing. The fact of the world is people still want that hard copy in their hands, and in the legal world we need that original signature."
Most clients don't even want to see e-mailed documents but rather want a copy mailed to them, he says.
"Even if I e-mail documents to people, they'll just print up a copy on their end, so, really, no paper is saved."
While Mr. Behiel's practice is trying to wean itself off of paper gradually, Uptown Health Centre, a walk-in clinic in Toronto's suburb of Richmond Hill, is trying to do it cold turkey. Just as in the legal profession, however, Uptown director Moe Jiwan discovered that old habits in health care are hard to break.
"One of the things we're really good at in health care is creating a lot of paper. Each report is followed by another report that's followed by another report, and it's become a disease that affects everything health care touches," Mr. Jiwan said.
Shortly after opening in 2003, Uptown was swamped with paper from files, faxes and prescriptions and caught in a deadly spiral of spending tens of thousands of dollars to maintain and accumulate yet more paper.
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