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C h a p t e r 6 : h a p t e r 6 : G o i n g P a p e r l e s s o i n g P a p e r l e s s 105
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Maintaining a paperless office isn’t a fanciful notion. You can do it, but there are more
mental hurdles than technological.
We’ve all heard the stories of organizations brought to their corporate knees because
important data files were lost. That may have been the case 10 or 20 years ago, but in the
twenty-first century, we’re all tech savvy enough to follow good backup procedures—plus,
equipment is monumentally more reliable. Most companies have backups scheduled to be
performed after-hours in a totally unattended way. Further, a new trend is to eliminate
backup media entirely (tapes, CDs, DVDs, and so forth) and schedule backups using
a commercial online storage service.
Given that thousands of pages of documents can be backed up onto a CD-ROM, can
you imagine the savings in backing up a filing cabinet full of paper documents. Although
this incurs some initial cost and takes time to do, what would happen if the office caught
fire? And this is just copying existing paper. If you adopt a paperless office, you only have
to do it once, and then it’s all maintenance.
Is it likely your office will catch fire and you’ll lose important documents? Probably not.
But the chances of the paperwork being lost or misfiled is a real consideration. In fact,
25 percent of all enterprise documents that are misplaced are never found again. And if the
document is especially important, you’ll spend hundreds of dollars to find it.
NOTE Also take into consideration paperwork that is sensitive. True, payroll and proprietary
company paperwork as well as client information need to be secure, and for years locked offices PART III
and filing cabinets have been used to that end. However, restricting access to information
maintained online can be easier, and you won’t have padlocks hanging off filing cabinets.
Although the point of this chapter isn’t to prompt you to chain yourself to a tree, it is
important to realize the environmental effects of moving as much as you can toward
a paperless office.
The paperless office brings sundry benefits, not only to your organization, but also to
the environment, including the following:

• Lower paper costs
• Less pollution
• Less paper use
• Smaller waste disposal cost
• Lower storage costs
• Less energy use
• Less storage space needed
• Fewer trees cut
• Lower postage costs
• Less pulping
• Easier document handling
• Less waste to be recycled, burned, or sent to a landfill
• Less waste production by the organization
• Less landfill capacity needed