The word 'paperless' has become one of the less fashionable terms of IT hyperbole over recent years, because predictions of the paperless office have so obviously proved false. There is growing evidence, however, that the tools to make the paperless office a reality are now becoming available.
This will put a greater burden on those responsible for the security of enterprise systems. If paper is finally replaced as the main medium for the presentation and storage of information, then maintaining the integrity of the information, and protecting the delivery system from misuse, will be very important.
Paperless offices
The subject of the paperless office was tackled at the recent Seybold Seminar and Exhibition on Paperless Publishing, held in Boston in the US. This event, now in its 30th year, broke with tradition by examining the application and potential of the paperless office in some detail. Normally, it concentrates on technology. Delegates were asked how the paperless office would affect firms, with particular reference to the publishing business. Many of the latest developments in this area, however, will affect companies outside the publishing industry.
Bruce Chizen, president and chief executive of publishing software firm Adobe was one of the keynote speakers at the event. He said, 'It is no longer about paper or browsers on desktops, it is about making visually rich, reliable information available anywhere, any time, on any device.'
To date, the paperless ideal has only been achieved in specialised areas. For example, Compaq recently announced a contract with Chicago-based Allscripts Health Care Solutions. The deal, worth some US$100 million over three years, will provide 15,000 doctors and health care professionals with a Compaq iPaq handheld unit with which to access clinical data, dictate notes and write prescriptions. This is a good example of an application where operating within a defined and highly structured content environment makes it possible to remove paper as the main vehicle for delivering information.
Achieving a paperless state in the wider world of unstructured corporate data, however, presents a number of practical problems. One is the difficulty of finding devices that are convenient and easy for users to handle. This is a problem that many companies have tried to solve, but none has developed a substitute for paper that matches its convenience and ease of use.
Palm and GoReader used the Seybold event to display their e-book reader systems. E-book is a generic term used to describe books distributed in electronic formats. These e-book systems are, initially at least, being targeted at consumers, though some argue that corporates would be better customers for such systems. Corporates differ from consumers in that they can create and manage closed environments where end-to-end solutions can be effectively imposed on individual users. They can choose the content and delivery mechanism as a complete package, which may prove to be more attractive to suppliers, at least in the short term.
The main problem for firms will be in choosing the most appropriate client for individual users. The widely popular Palm or Psion handhelds may offer physical convenience  they are both small and light  but they have small displays. On the other hand, e-book systems offer better readability, but are much bigger and heavier.
PC power in a tablet
Microsoft's Tablet PC offers another potential solution, and was promoted by the company at the Seybold conference. The Tablet PC is not expected to ship until late next year at the earliest, but according to Dick Brass, Microsoft's vice president of development, it will provide an answer to the client device problem.
The Tablet will have the power of a PC, and will be powerful enough to run applications such as Word and Excel, or Adobe's Acrobat or Photoshop, said Brass. Its specification will allow it to store the equivalent of 200,000 books or three years' worth of documents from a typical office.
The screen size will be 10.4in and the weight will be around 1.5lb. And here lies a potential problem, not just for Microsoft but for all contenders in the client market. No one is sure whether an approximately A4-sized unit weighing 1.5lb will be popular with users. It is big enough and technically rich enough to fulfil the needs of most enterprise users. But would they carry it around with them? It is clear that many devices users currently carry are technically inadequate, but at least they can fit in a pocket.
A paperless environment also raises the stakes when it comes to the issue of security. The impact of viruses such as The Love Letter, which bit deep into many firms, demonstrates a fundamental problem with a paperless environment. All of a company's mission-critical data can become vulnerable to attack if all of it is digital.
The paperless office, therefore, will only become a reality when companies and all of their business partners--be they multinational organisations or individual contractors--adopt the most stringent security management and virus protection.
The evidence so far is that this key objective is still some way off.
