why the paperless office is finally on its way - wsjhollykruse.com/paperlessofficewsj.pdf · to say...

Every year, America’s office workers print out or photocopy approximately onetrillion pieces of paper. If you add in all the other paper businesses produce, the

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Why the Paperless Office Is Finally onIts WayThe shift comes amid a steady decline in paper usage coupled with rise in tablets, mobiledevices

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HP has agreed to buy Samsung’s printing and copying business. Shown, an employee uses a photocopier atSamsung’s Creative Lab last year. PHOTO: JEAN CHUNG/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Updated Sept. 18, 2016 8:37 p.m. ET

By

CHRISTOPHER MIMS

Why the Paperless Office Is Finally on Its Way - WSJ http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-paperless-office-is-finally...

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utility bills and invoices and bank statements and the like, the figure rises to 1.6trillion. If you stacked all that paper up, it would be 18,000 times as high asMount Everest. It would reach nearly halfway to the moon.

This is why HP Inc.’s acquisition of Samsung Electronics Co.’s printing andcopying business last week makes sense. HP, says a company spokesman, has lessthan 5% of the market for big, high-throughput office copying machines. Thecompany says the acquisition will incorporate Samsung’s technology in newdevices, creating a big opportunity for growth.

Yet by all rights, this business shouldn’t exist. Forty years ago, at least, we werepromised the paperless office. In a 1975 article in BusinessWeek, an analyst atArthur D. Little Inc., predicted paper would be on its way out by 1980, and nearlydead by 1990.

The reality is the high-water mark for the total number of pages printed inoffices was in 2007, just before the recession, says John Shane, an analyst atInfoTrends, which has tracked the printing and document creation industriesfor the past 25 years and who compiled the eye-popping figures cited above.

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To say we haven’t gotten the paperless office so far isn’t to say we won’t. It isalways dangerous to say “this time it’s different,” but this time it just might be.For the first time in history, there is a steady decline of about 1% to 2% a year inoffice use of paper. Add in the dip in use during the most recent recession, and asof 2016, we are already 10% below the peak of the number of pages produced byoffice printing and copying in 2007.

This trend represents inroads made by everything from tech unicorns such asDocuSign Inc., the biggest player in electronic signatures, to the rise of tabletsand mobile devices. More important, it represents a change that took muchlonger than anyone anticipated. It was delayed by the fact that business getsdone in vastly more ad hoc and complicated ways than anyone appreciated.

The persistence of paper in the workplace—60% of which isn’t optional printing,says Mr. Shane—represents business processes that change slowly, if at all. It isthe small- and medium-size businesses that have been the slowest to get rid ofpaper—in other words, to fully digitize their workflows.

There is also the fact that paper is awesome. It is the only input and displaytechnology we have that weighs almost nothing, costs pennies, is readable inalmost any light, and doesn’t require an internet connection. It is the epitome ofportability and durability.

Xerox Corp. employs a team of ethnographers to study why people print, says itshead of workflow automation, Andy Jones. Their research reveals “There are somany work practices and attitudes that are ingrained in how companies work,”making it surprisingly difficult for older, larger companies to change. And whenMr. Shane asked respondents why they did the 40% of printing that wasn’tabsolutely necessary for their job, the most common answer was simply thatthey “liked paper.”

Still, companies are making genuine progress. Take Bahrns Equipment Inc., ofEffingham, Ill. Tara Funneman, who has worked for 27 years in the office of thecompany, which sells and distributes forklifts and lawn-and-garden equipment,says when she started in 1987, they had only one “really large” computer theyused once a month for five to 10 minutes. “We printed one report from Lotus1-2-3, turned it back off and everything else was done by hand,” she says.


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Nowadays, every oneof Bahrns’s servicetechnicians carries aniPad or a mobilephone, and usessoftware made byReston, Va.-basedCanvas Solutions Inc.The device andsoftware togetherreplace what used tobe three-part formsfilled out with pen on aclipboard, which wereoften incomplete,inaccurate, or illegible,and were a nightmareto input into thecompany’s back-officesystems. Switching toCanvas three years agohas already eliminatedone clerical position atthe company, says Ms.Funneman.

Knowledge workersalso still print outdocuments to markup, edit, learn from,and collaborate onthem. But, at least inpart, this may begenerational. Onereason we are closer tothe paperless office isnew, digital nativeorganizations tend notto use the stuff.


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And as cloud-basedcollaboration toolslike Microsoft Office

365 and Google Docs become the norm, the rest of us may find ourselves simplyaccomplishing these tasks in ways that don’t perfectly map to the way weaccomplished them on paper.

History has shown the demise of paper will be gradual. The amount people printin offices may be declining 1% to 2% a year, but it is still a mind-bogglingly largemarket.

“I think it will take 15-20 years, when the millennials who grew up with digitalphotos and smartphones take over senior positions in companies, to see thetransition to a paperless office,” says Loo Wee Teck, head of consumerelectronics at market research firm Euromonitor. “We, the Gen Xers, are thedinosaurs hindering evolution.”

Write to Christopher Mims at [email protected]

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