Love Of Paper Foils ‘Paperless Office’ Despite Spread Of Computerization, Use Of Paper Has Held Steady Or Grown

For all the talk of compressing the world into bits and bytes, workers across America are shunning the concept of the “paperless office.”

From small home offices to Fortune 500 headquarters, people are toiling amid growing piles of paper - notes, written reports, photocopies of written reports, print-outs of reports, newsletters, faxes, memos and even sticky notes.

Paperless office? Don’t make them laugh.

“People are in love with paper. They want to feel it in their hands,” said Dan Cox, a representative of San Antonio-based Professional Filing Systems, a company that sells everything from office shelving to color-coded file folders.

“Say you get a computerized imaging system for your records,” Cox said. “What’s the first thing you do? You call up some document and print it out. You actually create more paper.”

Experts throughout the papermaking and file storage industries all say the same thing: Despite the computerization of American offices, the use of paper has remained steady and, in some cases, has increased.

Jerry Mallory, records analyst with the Arizona Department of Libraries, Archives and Public Records, said the document warehouse at 19th Avenue and Jefferson Street near downtown Phoenix has been expanded three times in the past 10 years.

“We have seen people try to achieve the paperless office,” he said. “But all the thousands of computers we see all have one thing in common: They’re all hooked up to at least one printer.

“The proliferation of paper has increased dramatically with the introduction of computers.” The concept of the paperless office dates back more than 20 years to a time when people saw the advent of electronic machines in the workplace and overestimated their impact on the use of paper.

A June 30, 1975, article in “Business Week” magazine touted “the office of the future,” saying word-processing equipment would allow workers to work on and transfer files electronically.

“For them,” the article stated, “it will be the start of the paperless office.”

Cox said his uncle, Ron Cox, who founded the company in 1985, has been in the paper-filing business since the 1970s.

“He (Ron) tells the story of when microfilm came around, and how all the old timers cried that the sky was falling,” he said. “But nothing really happened. We still have paper.”

Andy Drysdale, spokesman for paper manufacturer Boise Cascade, said the production of “uncoated” paper for use in homes and offices still accounts for about 60 percent of its revenues.

“We don’t see signs that the paperless office is anything that’s going to come to pass any time soon,” Drysdale said. “People still have an appetite for a hard copy.”

At Haworth Inc., a Holland, Mich., company that manufactures office furniture, including filing cabinets, business has doubled in the past five years, a trend company executives see continuing.

“The filing cabinet business is booming. Our whole industry is growing,” said Kurt VanderSchuur, product manager for Haworth.

“During the ‘80s, everyone thought, ‘Oh, the paperless office.’ But there isn’t going to be a paperless office, at least not in the near future. It’s the Information Age. And people send e-mail. But if you need records, people still print it out.”

Why do workers shun the paperless office concept?

Some say it’s human nature, the need to have something to touch or put in a pile on your desk.

Others say it’s a lingering distrust of computers, where precious words and numbers are at the mercy of a power surge, a crashing disk or a clumsy keystroke.

But some theories say dependence on paper is just a bad habit that eventually will disappear as a new, electronically hip generation takes over.

Cox sees a more basic reason: money.

“A client of mine put 5 million documents on a computerized imaging system,” he said. “The software alone was over $3 million. Then, there’s annual maintenance contracts and consulting. It only goes up from there.”

Cox said saving hard copies of the same records probably would have cost the company in the neighborhood of $200,000.

“Can you cost-justify that?” he asked. “Maybe. But then you’ll just turn around and make a hard copy of it.”