You’re closer to the vision of a paperless office than you think

Almost all banking has shifted to paperless operations, and most organisations have followed suit. So, have we finally achieved the ‘paperless office’ vision that Xerox outlined in the 1975 Businessweek article?

The paperless office never fully materialised. Instead, we seem to have struck a balance—abandoning typewriters and postal mail while working at the speed of digital technology. This middle ground is often described as ‘paper-lite’.

It's hard to imagine now, but 30 years ago, office supply cupboards were stocked with carbon copy paper, and communication with colleagues was by phone or through internal memo envelopes. Filing cabinets were crammed with folders, correspondence, and invoices and filled every available corner.

Introduce a Gen S colleague to that office environment, and they’d say they couldn’t function. With email, Zoom, Teams, the cloud, laptops and smartphones, the modern office is now ‘paperless’ by nearly every meaningful metric. 

The death of paper was premature

Yet, paper never truly disappeared—especially in business and government. While we no longer type directly onto paper, the laser printer has ensured we continue to print in massive volumes. In the United States alone, nearly 3.7 million tons of copy paper—equivalent to over 700 trillion sheets—are used annually. And a considerable amount of analogue storage remains in use. It's well-known that the UK’s NHS  and Japan’s economy are among the largest users of fax machines, for instance. 

There's a distinct attachment to paper, even in some of the world’s most advanced economies. In the US, serious digital banking—and open banking in particular—is a distant goal. While you may not have written a check in decades in Europe, paper checks remain standard practice in the US. There's no direct counterpart to transferring funds to third-party accounts, as is common elsewhere. For many services, you have to visit a Bank of America website or branch in order to get a check mailed.

I'm happy to share that my company recently completed a very successful round of investment. However, this process, in Germany at least, required a significant amount of paper-based administration. It involved working closely with a notary and providing numerous wet signatures, which were securely transmitted and authenticated through a network of specialists known as apostilles. So, paper remains a strong preference in many parts of the world and for various processes. 

Companies specialising in physical paper archiving and storage also continue to thrive—Iron Mountain, for example, reported over $5.5 billion in sales in 2023, with a market capitalisation exceeding $33 billion. While most office work is now conducted in ‘bits’, a significant amount still exists in ‘atoms’. As a result, the conversation about achieving a truly paperless office is ongoing.

Your path to truly paper-free work

Two recent developments, however, reinforce the belief that the 1975 vision of a paperless office is actually much closer to becoming a reality than we might realise.

Even in the 1970s, the high cost of storing large volumes of paper was a significant challenge, prompting the adoption of alternatives like microfiche and microfilm. Today, with the sharp drop in digital storage costs—256 gigabytes, now standard in most laptops, would have cost around $20 billion in the 1950s at today's value—it’s hard to imagine any organisation choosing to store its data primarily in anything other than electronic form, especially in the cloud.

So much for those remaining filing cabinets, then. I still have a few myself, and one day soon I’ll finally clear them out, digitising the documents I want to keep and recycling the bulk of what I once thought essential.  Closer to home, despite the billions of packs of copy paper still being purchased, the decline is evident here too: shipments of hard copy peripherals like printers and copiers fell by 15.5% between 2023 and 2024, according to IDC. 

That decline is driven by two key factors. One is COVID. While many of us have returned to the office, the widespread acceptance of remote and hybrid work as the new normal is unlikely to be reversed. It benefits both employees and companies in countless ways.

As a result, organisations have had to adopt digital and inherently ‘paperless’ ways of working by default. This shift has naturally reduced the need for that combined printer-copier—the one no one really knows how to operate. 

The ongoing shift away from paper is accelerating, driven by these evolving factors. Yet, an even more immediate catalyst for change has emerged, which is the remarkable advancements in the functionality and utility of modern electronic document management. These digital content services tools are not only replacing paper but also significantly enhancing our work processes and collaboration capabilities.

The return of Document Management

The category name for technology to manage digital documents and other content is ‘Enterprise Content Management’ (ECM). ECM is all about storing, managing, searching and archiving documents. ECM platforms enable efficient organisation, seamless collaboration, secure archiving and strategic use of vast data resources.

The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) sector showed impressive strength in 2023, achieving a market value of $37 billion, according to Fortune. Forecasts suggest even more significant growth, with the market expected to expand to $151 billion by 2032, reflecting a robust annual growth rate of 17%. Central to this remarkable resilience is a fundamental shift in business perspective. While companies are moving away from paper-based systems, they continue to view their operations through a ‘document-centric’ lens. This ongoing focus on documents drives the continued relevance and expansion of ECM solutions.

Indeed, while the term ‘content’ in today's digital landscape includes various formats like video and audio, the document remains the primary unit of information in the business world. Despite the transition to digital platforms, business operations still revolve around familiar constructs such as invoices, orders, and application forms and other items that are traditionally paper-based. The key difference now is that these ‘documents’ are stored in the cloud rather than in physical filing cabinets.

The enduring relevance of document management in today's business world is striking, so much so that it has prompted a notable shift in industry nomenclature. Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, had previously phased out the term ‘document management’ in favour of broader concepts like Enterprise Content Management (ECM) or Content Services. However, recognising the persistent centrality of documents in business operations and mindsets, Gartner has made a deliberate decision to reintroduce the term.

More recently, next-generation ECM systems have evolved to combine ECM capabilities with process automation, such as automating the paying of an invoice or managing a contract. With the addition of AI, via deep learning for smart document recognition and large language models for intelligent interaction (like ChatGPT)—I refer to this combination as  ‘intelligent content automation’. These innovations are ushering in a new era of business content with contextual understanding, nearly akin to self-awareness. By automating critical business processes and making document discovery more intuitive and responsive, these advanced software solutions are helping organisations in the public and private sectors manage vast information repositories more effectively.

And we increasingly interact with these intelligent documents in a paperless way. Specifically, I envision that we'll work in the office using spoken natural language. Much like how secretaries once acted as buffers and assistants, machines will now manage incoming documents, automatically routing or processing them based on the rules we establish.

This document ‘sentience’ promises to significantly boost productivity. Imagine interfacing with an entire corporate knowledge base through conversational queries, engaging with documents via natural dialog, posing questions in everyday language, and crafting new applications through verbal instructions.

In other words, we’ll have such productive virtual documents that reaching for the printer will become an increasingly rare occurrence.

Absolutely, that’s the kind of paperless office we all want to work in. Wouldn’t you?

Dr John Bates of SER Group, a Bonn-headquartered leader in the provision of Intelligent Content Services