by Lena Loheim Kangevik Illustration Tove Hennix

The paperless office is both utopia and reality. The benefits are numerous and more and more people are increasingly going digital. With the right system, there is no denying that the paperless office is efficient. But there are still problems. The future will see intelligent meeting rooms and IT that interprets your actions and makes your everyday life easier.

“The paperless office is just about as plausible as the paperless toilet,” says Daniel Akenine, National Technology Officer at Microsoft, to open the discussion about the paperless office. “Maybe that’s something of a flippant comment, but a certain level of paper usage will continue for a long time. Also, there are trends in paper just like in everything else. Just look at the LP. It was expected to disappear but it’s on the way back. The LP is more than just the music. You get a sleeve to read and hold in your hands. Paper will go through the same process. There’s something physical about paper that a monitor can’t replace.”

Creating the paperless office is thus not the same as doing away with paper completely. But going paperless in offices is on the increase, and the benefits are indisputable. “The biggest benefit of the digital office is that there’s much better access to information,” says Daniel Akenine. “It’s also easier to share digital information and it costs nothing to copy.”

Paperless ambition
Daniel Akenine feels that many companies have made a lot of progress in their paperless ambitions. They work digitally in real time and scan old documents so that as much as possible is digitalised. Akenine believes that going paperless is ideal for the service sector, which often delivers intangible services. There is also a high level of digitalisation in the field of healthcare. Although a lot of backup is used there, as there are major consequences if systems were to crash. “But I must emphasise that security in particular has never been as high as it is now.” But the paperless office is still plagued by one major problem. It’s not just about digitalising the office’s documents. They must also be systematically organised and sorted in a way that makes them useful to work with. “Creating documents and saving them digitally is easy. So an intranet can contain hundreds of thousands of documents. The problem is, how do I find what’s relevant for me?” says Daniel Akenine.

Internal searches
When we search online, documents are ranked based on users and their searches in a kind of self-generating system. At the moment there are not any similarly smart algorithms in internal searches as those on the Internet. Over the next five to ten years, 3 steps towards the paperless office
1. Print on both sides of the paper. It sounds basic, and it is. Follow this policy and cut paper consumption by around 30-40 per cent.
2. Save information so that it is searchable. You do this using programs and other software that suit the company’s purpose. Also draw up a policy to give the company’s documents metadata. These will be needed when search systems have been developed that are optimised for internal use.
3. Create a good system to protect information. Security has never been better than it is today. This means that more people will help with digitalisation.

the IT industry will therefore be focusing on finding these smart algorithms. The challenge facing the paperless office is processing documents’ metadata. Semantics and finding good programs that can categorise documents will thus be an increasingly important tool for the effective paperless office.

“When we save a document, we need to do so much more than simply save it. We need to link it to other files, we need to find systems to see who last viewed it, what the document contains, and so on. All of this is to help with searches. For example, if I find a document and see that you created it, and I trust you, it becomes more valuable to me. Smart systems like this are currently on the drawing board at IT companies.”

IT working for you
Daniel Akenine fully understands those who still use paper in certain situations, even though he himself lives to a large extent digitally. “At the moment, the computer screen isn’t ideal for reading. We’re distracted by other documents, e-mail and so on. Also, we may prefer to settle down and read in peace and quiet, on the bus or in bed. So for the foreseeable future we’ll continue to print things on paper when we want to read them. “The digital reader,” says Daniel Akenine, “might possibly change our behaviour.” Maybe we will also become more digitalised as a more data-intensive generation takes over. “Yes, but even the older generations change. We see that clearly. But it doesn’t happen as quickly as for younger people.” But IT is not just about the paperless office. Daniel Akenine spends a lot of time working on future scenarios. “IT will spread out from the computer to a large number of devices all around us. We won’t just be using a keyboard and mouse. We’ll work with IT in a totally different way than we do today. IT will work for you in the background rather than at your command.”

“For example, we’ll have intelligent meeting rooms that remember exactly what you did there last time. We’ll be seeing many more virtual meetings. IT will be able to interpret your gestures, your voice, your intonation and other behaviour. In your home you’ll have 30-40 machines to talk to, machines that are there to make everyday life easier.”