Paperless office in itself is nothing new. According to Wikipedia, Paperless office was a visionary or publicist's slogan, supposed to apply to the office of the future. The suggestion was that office automation would make paper redundant for routine tasks such as record-keeping and bookkeeping. The concept came to prominence in the days of the introduction of the personal computer. An early prediction of the paperless office was made in a Business Week article already in 1975. While the prediction of a PC on every desk was remarkably prescient (or, regarding it as marketing talk, very effective), the paperless nature of office work was less prophetic. Printers and photocopiers have made it much easier to produce documents in bulk, word-processing has deskilled secretarial work involved in writing those documents, and paper proliferated.

"A visionary or publicist's slogan, supposed to apply to the office of the future". I remember studying in the Helsinki University of Technology one of my friends actually made his PhD thesis in a paperless mode in the very early 80's. However, what most of us experienced was that the amount of paper was increasing. It was so much easier actually to distribute documents and to print documents that everybody printed and distributed them quite carelessly all over the place - printed them, threw them away, and printed them again. Since 1975 when the prediction of the paperless office was initially made in the Business Week article, the usage of paper has radically increased because of the new information technology. It became so much easier to send-print-throw away, send-print-throw away, even for a company of Accenture's size with 140 000 people: 140.000 potetial recipients for a mass mailing!

We like paper because there are so many excellent qualities; it's very comfortable to read, it's very easy to hold, it's easy to manage - you can take your papers with you, it's good for handling because it's easy to scribble notes and make underlining and comments on the margins. Paper is really easy to manage and I think that's one of the main reasons for its longevity.

But there are many things paper is not so good at. It's not easy to find information when you have piles of paper on your desk. It's also very difficult to work globally, if you have distributed teams and you need to exchange information in more or less real time between India and Finland for example. Many of the services and tasks today in the globally shrunk environment, in this totally flat, totally borderless environment, are being done close to the client or are gravitating to the place in the world where it's the most cost-efficient and where the productivity of doing them is higher. When we follow these trends we have to digitalise information, to copy and mail it. And with the amount of information increasing, we have also got space problems - and have started to hate binders.

We already have technologies that have the good qualities of paper without the bad ones. Desktop search is now widely available and we have ad hoc collaboration tools by which we can easily build teams that work across borders or across organisational lines. Connectivity is getting better and better so we don't really need to carry our papers or documents with us but we can always have remote access to the information that we need. Storage technologies develop in the way that we can have terabytes of storage capacity in your PC very soon.

This presentation was actually made using paperless technologies; I never had a meeting with the colleagues who advised me - we worked on-line, we didn't drive a single kilometer to meet physically and nobody had printed out anything before today. Everything was put together using basic technology - nothing was really ground-breaking. And it was very cost-efficient. Mobile networks and mobile phones are productivity tools for many things: e-mail browsers, presentations, word processing, and access to corporate data. All of that is today everyday technology.

How to do the transition from a paper-field to paperless office? This is mainly about behaviour and corporate culture, not about technologies. We need to awake in ourselves the curiosity of the little kid. Children and Teenagers are now born and raised in a digital environment and actually try out all these new technologies in a very natural way. When I begun my studies at the Helsinki University of Technology and tried to program a computer I had to punch cards. Development has been relatively quick, even to my generation. Teenagers are attracted to the new technology, and they are willing to use it and take the full power of it. And of course the adoption of new paperless technologies has a positive impact on the competitiveness of our companies and our society.

There have been studies in Finland about the relation of GDP growth and information technology, for example by Markku Pohjola from the Helsinki School of Economics. His estimate is that roughly half of the GDP growth in Finland during the last 10 years can be explained by information technology. And he has seen correlations between the much quicker growth rate that US has experienced compared to Europe, and the usage of communication and high technologies. The EU has also recognised that we need to increase competitiveness by the usage of new technologies.

I think we already have the technologies available. Adoption is sometimes low, but I it's picking up right now. The older ones are always the slow ones and they have to move a bit outside their comfort zones.

Moving into the paperless world in general means also that we enable information searching, sharing, collaboration more efficiently. Its a "whatabout" of our own behavior change. Let's leave behind us the old sayings like "information is power" or information is whatever. The key to competitiveness is sharing information and collaborating instead of trying to keep information behind closed doors. It's a big challenge for anybody of us to keep up with the technological development but it's also exciting and rewarding.n

Symposium "Information Technology, Competitiveness and the Environment" in Helsinki, November 20, 2006
Website Management and Contact:
European Support Centre of the Club of Rome
http://esc.clubofrome.org