Papers in Paperless

After a week of training, trial and error, rote processing, phone calls and answers regarding taking our office paperless, I thought I'd offer a brief update.

You can not believe how many sardonic comments I've received about the concept of reducing paper in the office. One friend even sent me a roll of toilet paper in anticipation of a visit to our office and needing some. My own son enquired how I could call it "paperless" if indeed there will still be paper lying around. My reply, of course, is to think of it as "less paper" rather than "no paper." Maybe that should be my new refrain: we're taking the office lesspaper. Hmm.

Daughter #2 (the one who has a minor degree in Computer Science) and I received the initial burst of training and began the input process last week. She understood and picked things up easily and quickly, and I am beginning to get a feel for it, though I can't really explain it to someone else. The basic concept works this way: Whatever documents come into the office, whether electronically or as a piece of paper, get put into the computer system. If the document starts as an electronic file, like an e-mail or a Word or Excel document, it's just a matter of "filing" it on the computer. If it's a piece of physical paper, it is first scanned and then "filed." The scanner has its own computer to tell it what to do, but all the computers are connected so that everyone can have access to the data. I expected the scanner to be some huge piece of equipment, like a copier, but it's actually rather petite:





So when the documents are all "filed" away in the computer system, we only have to perform a short search to retrieve the document, using some key words that the documents were indexed with in the filing process. That's the theory, anyway. In actuality, the key reason for going this route is not to rid the office of paper, though that will be a nice side effect. The primary reason is to be able to retrieve documents efficiently and quickly. I have gone looking for things we've inserted just to check it out, and it works great; the real test, of course, will be when I HAVE to find something right now. And just as in building communities "it always takes longer," so in going to the lesspaper office. There are questions and little glitches and the second daughter had to go back to Tucson to her real life and there is the training of the rest of the office yet to happen, so this really is just the beginning of the effort.

The other question we had to answer was how much paper to scan; we estimate we have about 40,000 paper documents in our office, which by corporate standards is not very much. But by how-long-can-I-sit-here-feeding-papers-and-indexing-them standards it's quite a lot. Obviously, we are starting with the current projects and then we will see how far back we're willing to go, but I'd rather not make a commitment on that just yet. Suffice it to say that my own filing cabinets are emptying rapidly; things will definitely slow down somewhat when I start on The Mister's paperwork.

Am I still excited in my own little accountant-like way? You betcha! I would like to be spending more hours at the office, but I also have other real-life opportunities that prevent that. But we will all keep plugging away, and hopefully very soon whatever document we need will be at our fingertips, literally.