<b>The dream seems to recede further into the future every year. But now sales show that offices may finally be turning the page on paper use.</b>
<br> By Matt Bradley
<br>For office innovators, the unrealized dream of the "paperless" office is a classic example of high-tech hubris. Today's office drone is drowning in more paper than ever before. But after decades of hype, American offices may finally be losing their paper obsession. The demand for paper used to outstrip the growth of the US economy, but the past two or three years have seen a marked slowdown in sales - despite a healthy economic scene,
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<br>Analysts attribute the decline to advances in digital databases and communication systems, employment trends, and a generation of office workers who are more comfortable with the new technology. Escaping our craving for paper, however, will be anything but a cold-turkey affair.
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<br>"Old habits are hard to break," says Merilyn Dunn, communications supplies director for InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, a market research firm in Weymouth, Mass. "There are some functions that paper serves where a screen display doesn't work. Those functions are both its strength and its weakness."
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<br>In the early to mid-'90s, a booming economy and improved desktop printers helped boost paper sales by 6 to 7 percent each year. The convenience of desktop printing allowed office workers to indulge in printing anything and everything at very little effort or cost.
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<br>But now, the growth rate of paper sales in the United States is flattening by about half a percent each year. Between 2004 and 2005, Ms. Dunn says, plain white office paper will see less than a 4 percent growth rate, despite the strong overall economy. A primary reason for the change, says Dunn, is that for the first time ever, some 47 percent of the workforce entered the job market after computers had already been introduced to offices.
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<br>"We're finally seeing a reduction in the amount of paper being used per worker in the workplace," says John Maine, vice president of RISI, a pulp and paper economic consulting firm in Charlottesville, Va. "More information is being transmitted electronically, and more and more people are comfortable with the information residing only in electronic form without printing multiple backups."
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<br>In addition, Mr. Maine points to the lackluster employment market for white-collar workers - the primary driver of office paper consumption - for the shift in paper usage.
<br>The real paradigm shift may be in the way paper is used. Since the advent of advanced and reliable office-network systems, data storage has moved away from paper archives. The secretarial art of "filing" is disappearing from job descriptions. Much of today's data may never leave its original digital format.
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<br>The changing attitudes toward paper have finally caught the attention of paper companies, says Richard Harper, a researcher at Microsoft and coauthor of the book, "The Myth of the Paperless Office" (2002). "All of a sudden, the paper industry has started thinking, 'We need to learn more about the behavioral aspects of paper use,' " he says. "They had never asked, they'd just assumed that 70 million sheets would be bought per year as a literal function of economic growth."
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<br>To reduce paper use, some companies are working to combine digital and paper capabilities. For example, Xerox Corp. is developing electronic paper: thin digital displays that respond to a stylus, like a pen on paper. Notations can be easily erased or saved digitally.
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<br>Another idea, intelligent paper, comes from Anoto Group. It would allow notations made with a stylus on a page printed with a special magnetic ink to simultaneously appear on a computer screen.
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<br>Even with such technological advances, the improved capabilities of digital storage continues to act against "paperlessness," argues Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif. In his prophetic and metaphorical 1989 essay, "The Electronic Piñata," he suggests that the increasing amounts of electronic data necessarily require more paper.
<br>"The information industry today is like a huge electronic piñata, composed of a thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core," Mr. Saffo wrote. The growing paper crust "is most noticeable, but the hidden electronic core that produces the crust is far larger - and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are becoming paperless, but we hardly notice at all."
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<br>In the same way that digital innovations have increased paper consumption, Saffo says, so has video conferencing - with its promise of fewer in-person meetings - boosted business travel.
<br>"That's one of the great ironies of the information age," Saffo says. "It's just common sense that the more you talk to someone by phone or computer, it inevitably leads to a face-to-face meeting. The best thing for the aviation industry was the Internet."
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<br>As buzzwords go, "paperless" has been bandied about for a long time with little or no results. The term "paperless clearing houses" was probably first coined in a 1966 article in the Harvard Business Review in reference to the emergence of digital data storage.
<br>But "paperlessness" did not enter the public's imagination until 1975, when a Business Week article entitled "The Office of the Future" predicted that by 1990 "most record-handling will be electronic."
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<br>The article quoted Xerox's George Pake, who rightly predicted a "TV-display terminal with keyboard" on office desks by 1995. "I'll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button," Pake told Business Week. "I can get my mail or any messages. I don't know how much hard copy [printed paper] I'll want in this world."
<br>Throughout the 1980s and '90s, the term "paperless" came to embody technology's promise to permanently change the way people do business.
<br>The exuberance sometimes took on a life of its own, with the trendiest companies demanding "paperlessness" long before it was practical.
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<br>In 1993, advertising mogul Jay Chiat of Chiat/Day was inspired to "free" his employees from paper - and to make that freedom mandatory - by eliminating desks and filing cabinets. The awkward, abortive attempt backfired: Employees started storing paper in the trunks of their cars and hauling it around the office on toy wagons.
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<br>"You can never go wrong by betting that change will go slower than everyone expects," says a sage Saffo. "We're still lurching into the paperless office future. That's a little bit of a surprise to me, but I didn't expect paper to disappear completely."
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<br>看了这篇文章，觉得这确实是一件挺有意思的事情。“无纸化办公”，这个说法并不陌生，并且至今仍然时髦，但是世界每个国家的纸张销售有增无减，不知道纸张减到哪里去了。正如文章中“未来学会”的技术趋势预测专家saffo先生所说：“数字技术的创新增加了纸张的消费，视频会议也一样，它本来是要减少会议的次数，却反而使出差的机会大增”，这是信息时代的一大讽刺的事情，大家都知道，你和某人通过电话或电脑聊得越多，就越是不可避免的要进行面对面的晤谈，而目前的无纸化办公状态也是，愈是要减少纸张的用量，就愈是要通过增加纸张用量的途径去实现。
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<br>记得几年以前，我们医院引进信息系统时，是这样的口号，“节省时间，把时间还给病人。”，本来护士站只需用一个人去抄医嘱，结果需要安排2-3个人去抄医嘱，因为那时又增加了一道程序，就是得把医嘱输入电脑，但是传统病历又并未取谛。这使得医院不得不花大把的精力去培训对计算机操作不熟悉的医生和护士，还得去纠正这个“新式系统”带来的麻烦，还有医生护士不断的埋怨。不过，这已经是几年前的事情了。现在一切都好多了，打破了传统的习惯以后，新的东西毕竟带着显而易见的优点，得到了大家的喜爱。我还总听到周围的人有不断的抱怨，国内坐飞机时使用的电子机票，竟是比传统的更复杂，根本没有体现电子化的优越。
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<br>这又是我想起了一个故事，这个故事上文中也有提及，1993年，chiat/day公司广告大享恰特受到启发，决定让自己的员工从纸张中“解脱”出来，而且是强制性的解脱，办法是搬走办公桌和档案柜，这一尴尬而不成熟的尝试产生了的喜剧性效果就是：员工们开始将纸张存在他们汽车后备箱里，还用玩具车拖着在办公室里走来走去。
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<br>我们做这些事情，只是想把复杂的事情变得简单，可是事实往往并非如此，我们在执行的过程中，往往会把简单的事情弄得很复杂。不过，世界是发展的，用长远的目光看，在由复杂到简约的过程中，也就是任何一次变革，都会经历混乱，只有学会把简单的事情弄得混乱，复杂，才有可能得到真正的解放。
<br>起码，我是这么认为的。
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发表于 2006-2-14 09:38:23