Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices 285
An anonymous reader writes "A campaign started by HelloFax, Google, Expensify, and others has challenged businesses to get rid of physical paper from their office environment in 2013. According to the EPA, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year, and the Paperless 2013 project wants to move all of those documents online. HelloFax CEO Joseph Walla said, 'The digital tools that are available today blow what we had even five years ago out of the water. For the first time, it's easy to sign, fax, and store documents without ever printing a piece of paper. It's finally fast and simple to complete paperwork and expense reports, to manage accounting, pay bills and invoice others. The paperless office is here – we just need to use it.' The companies involved all have a pretty obvious dog in this fight, but I can't say I'd mind getting rid of the stacks of paper HR sends me."
5 years ago? B.S. (Score:4, Informative)
I have been doing document management systems for 15 years and we were implementing paperless signing even in 1997. There's nothing new today that wasn't around and underused.
There's a significant cost per document type to create electronic versions and integrate it into a proper workflow. This doesn't have a ROI on low volume types.
Re:Get rid of printers (Score:5, Informative)
And how many screens? Let's take a typical development task - I've seen two independent people come up with requirement specification, of which a third requirement spec has to be generated (the first is what marketing wants a product to do, the second is what engineering wants the product to do, the third is what your little chunk of the entire project is supposed to do).
And from that, distill a test plan which has a requirements matrix that ties back to both original documents and the distilled document (tracability - every feature listed must be testable and tested).
Oh, and the first two documents change. A lot. It may be a numbering change, but that means all the documents need to change to adapt, and ensuring that it all matches up again, so you have to have all 4 documents open at once. Short of having four monitors to view them all simultaneously, it's a alt-tab nightmare.
Toss in a fifth document (say, documentation on your chunk - like how stuff interfaces), and now you have to also ensure your interface headers are up to date as well, AND ensure your requirements doc is still complete to have that document integrated into it (and testable!).
Oh, and that notepad? Paper. So you have to have notepad.exe open as well.
And I have been known to be the assinine QA tester who would chew out a developer if their tests weren't up to snuff. Not because it made me happy, but because I understood the value of ensuring that everything matched up. If you omit a step, I'd call you out because the next person who runs the test may not know that and mark a fail on something that should've passed.
Complete tracability and repeatability - when that software goes out the door, I can say the test plan met the requirements, point out how it matched up, and that if someone else took the same build out of code control and same version of the documents, they can repeat the same tests and have the same results. Because 6 months down the road, someone will ask "did we test this?" and "How did we test this?" and "Customer says it doesn't work". In which case I can either say - "oops, we didn't htink to test it" (new requirement and test case), or "oops, we didn't know the customer wanted it this way" (new requirement), or "yes we did, and here's how ew did it, and I can run it again to double-check". (Maybe customer got an engineering build and it failed because of a regression).