>>51292978
>something that instantaneously translates your thoughts into words and uploads it to a server
nsa pls go

>>51292978
>I think it won't happen till we get a nigh indestructible tablets or something that instantaneously translates your thoughts into words and uploads it to a server.
You mean like a keyboard?

The reason we don't have this is that paper's easier to, well, simpler to organize than digital files.
You have a big box labeled "2015", and in it goes everything from that year, with small dividers for each category.
When you have 20 staff with 20 different computers it's hard to keep track for historical purposes.
Installing a system that forced proper procedure would fix that, but most people would bitch.

Because you still need to sign papers
>please click ok to accept your resignation

A company I'm working at is slowly going paperless.

At the moment it's just easier to hand people a stack of papers and tell them to get it done. It's a bit more acceptable than dumping files in their home directory or something.

The workflow management is probably the biggest barrier at the moment.

If I had my own businesses I would go paperless desu.

>>51293024
walking, moving all of your limbs to file

or

adding tags to a document to have it automatically indexed in you need to do a specified search.

>>51293104
I have signed many things electronically
with a stylus and with a PIN

>>51293284
curious if they are taking active steps to do that. And if so what are they doing? or did they just tell you at orientation/ hang up a corporate poster?

>>51293672
Well, the two main things recently would be moving as much of our client communication to email (many clients prefer snail mail still though), and moving as much of our workflow to digital. At the moment 100% of what I do is digital, but I recieve work in paper form and am expected to return it in paper.

But we are down from 10-20 sheets per job to 1 usually at the moment, which is pretty neat (I process 10-20 jobs a day so that's potentially 100-200 sheets of savings per day).

Even though 1 doesn't sound like much, the barrier to reduce that to 0 is pretty big, we would have to reorganise a lot of workflow.

It would be easy if we were starting from nothing.

>>51292978
Why would we want to? Paper is useful and lasts for centuries. It's also cheap and honestly we do have trees. Not using paper to save some trees is just blatant, utter bullshit.

>>51293977
>lasts for centuries
maybe in a vacuumed sealed plexiglass frame

organization, and filing system for paper is often an entire job in and of itself

also how much physical space does 4.4 MB take up?
How much space does 2.5 lbs of paper take up?

(all measurements we based of the king james version of the bible. )

>>51293977
cheaper to use electricity desu

>>51294213
Has someone calculated how many paper sheets can be produced with the energy required to manufacture one tablet? Must be a lot, not to mention the environmental effects of using rare metals and whatnot these electronics require.

>>51294114
I have books that are a couple of hundred years old on my bookshelf. They have never been in a vacuum sealed plexiglass frame and they haven't degraded at all. I'm sure they would survive a millennium if they are kept in the same manner.

Paper has many advantages:
It's cheap
We have developed systems to take care of it in efficient, widely accepted ways
No computer or other tool is needed to read it
No computer or other tool is needed to write on it

Of course, there are many advantages to digitally storing data, but there are a few reasons why it is very difficult to motivate. First of all, what medium do we choose? 70 years ago people would have said we should turn everything into punched cards. Today people would choose something else, but whatever they choose it will be obsolete in just a few years, and soon you couldn't even access the data without a vintage device. Punched cards were used until 40 years ago, but when was the last time you saw a punched card? Floppy disks were used 15 years ago, now they are nowhere to be seen. You might try to solve this by having all data in some kind of archive, that is automatically transferred to a new medium when available, such as a cloud service. This is still expensive and requires some type of central authority though, and do you really trust google? Do you trust them to keep your data safe for 5 years? How about 50?

>>51294114
not to mention human language text is very easy to compress, and you can even gain more using dedupliation on datasets consisting of similar/multiple versions of documents

you could fit a library of books on a handful of tapes quite easily these days

>>51294264
Well I should think that cost of tablet / cost of paper = number of sheets of paper, but lets be honest every business has computers anyway/

>>51294352
long-term archival is a whole topic in itself

not to mention paper and digital don't have to be seperate, you can store digital text on a page much more efficiently than you can plain, human-readable text, though you'd be better to use microfilm or something as the medium over paper

>>51294352
>No computer or other tool is needed to write on it
I'm pretty sure you need a tool to write on paper.

Also, I'm pretty sure I can keep a USB labened "2015" forever in a drawer.

Other than that I agree with most of what you said, paper still has too many advantages to justify the effort of ditching it, then again in this technology era I'm sure most companies could manage to greatly reduce the ammount of paper used like >>51293883

Hard to hack into paper..

>>51294401
it wouldn't be accurate to compare only the initial cost either

consider the whole lifetime of the tablet, and how many pieces of paper didn't need to be used because it was in use instead

>>51294438
>Also, I'm pretty sure I can keep a USB labened "2015" forever in a drawer.
5-10 years before the data starts to deteriorate.

>>51294478
Rotational Velocidensity is a meme tad

>>51294478
/thread

For most companies, full digital would save time and money for everyone. Companies that deal with a lot of paper typically have to have significant space assigned to storage - usually so much that they have to use off-site storage systems for less-used documents. With paper, any time a document changes hands there needs to be a physical delivery of the document, which is always slower than either email or accessing a central storage server.

The problems are for big companies that introducing any major procedure changes is hard as hell. You have to create new procedures to make sure people don't mess shit up (you may have to develop a very complex set of file-access rules), and you have to train everyone to use the new procedures. You also need to somehow link the old paper system to the new digital system - either through a massive effort to digitize all the old files, or by making sure everyone is trained to use both systems and to keep them both integrated.

I think the main problem is that large organization that have been using paper for a long time (and are the biggest paper-users) have the hardest time converting. If you were to start a new company today it would be much much easier to just go full digital and reap the benefits.

A further problem is that technology tends to go obsolete quickly, meaning a system you design today may be nearly impossible to integrate with new systems going forward. Even old/new versions of the same document software are sometimes not properly backwards compatible, not to mention hardware compatibility, etc. This makes paper more attractive for long-term storage.

>>51294546
I would also say that for young people, digital seems foolproof because it has been around for their entire lives.

For older people who are typically higher up in companies, most of these technologies still feel relatively new and unproven, and it doesn't help that new technologies are constantly emerging.

Most companies use Windows for basic office computing, and that has only been around for roughly 25 years. Its continued existence and function depends not only on the continued existence of Microsoft but also the support of the various hardware manufacturers and other software companies that make the whole system fit together. If any part of the system falls through there could be significant issues not only having the system move forward but potentially even maintain access to the previous system (as hardware needs to be replaced every so often, etc).

Many companies, governments, etc need reliable access to files for much longer periods of time than the digital world can currently guarantee.

>>51294546
Holy shit

2 million business idea

a firm that specializes in digitizing paper files to move companies towards paperless.

File: maxresdefault[1].jpg (148 KB, 1920x1080) Image search: [Google]

148 KB, 1920x1080

>>51294546
Give everyone one of these
http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-digitalpaper/resource.solutions.bbsccms-assets-show-digitalpaper-digitalpaper.shtml
If I had $800 to spare I'll buy it today. If available I only read digital books already, PDF marking and editing is very good these days. All I'm missing is something to take notes.

>>51294546
>A further problem is that technology tends to go obsolete quickly, meaning a system you design today may be nearly impossible to integrate with new systems going forward. Even old/new versions of the same document software are sometimes not properly backwards compatible, not to mention hardware compatibility, etc. This makes paper more attractive for long-term storage.
I don't think this is valid, generally long term archives go virtually unused.

Digital archives can be stored as plain text or simple formats and will always be easily accessible. ASCII isn't going to go out of fashion any time soon, neither are integers for that matter.

Literally just the cost of change is what is keeping a lot of companies from going paperless.

>>51292978
We need to develop a tablet to tablet transfer protocol.

Say I needed to draw up a network layout for a coworker. I need to be able to walk over to his desk and "give him the paper" that I drew my notes on.

Syncing to email or something is too cumbersome. Or what if I didn't have that person's email?

>start new job
>marketing director is an old ass woman
>her office is basically a giant filing room, cabinets everywhere
>she prints EVERY email and puts them into relevant folders in her filing cabinets

>she's looking for contact information for something
>she prints the web page so she can read it
>files it away into her cabinets, never to be touched again

when she retired they hired a shredding company to come and recycle all her paper records. all of it was completely useless.

>>51294887
looks pretty solid

>>51295494
it's called android beam

>>51295494
>We need to develop a tablet to tablet transfer protocol.
I use a surface 3 at work. I take notes and draw shit using one note, then send it to my coworkers over e-mail. it's fairly quick and easy.

I see what you're saying though, a simpler way to hand off documents would be awesome.

>>51295494
isn't this pretty much what bluetooth is for?

>>51295502
I know a lot of such people. They think paper based storage still rules the world.

One of my bosses two part-time jobs ago was a paper pushing old man. His boss (and thus my boss' boss) was a little more tech savvy and whenever the higher up needs something he would come straight to me and ask me to look it up in their database.
This is despite that my boss, the old man, has a paper record of everything.
His office smelled like musty paper, and he loves it.

>>51293024

>You have a big box labeled "2015", and in it goes everything from that year, with small dividers for each category.

... you just described folders. Why would people bitch about it? It's much easier to organize files than it is to organize paper. If people are bitching about having to organize their documents at work, they probably shouldn't be employed.