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My wife was shopping the other night and her contact solution rang on the cash register as $5 and it should have rung as $3. The sixteen year old cashier called for a price check.

They waited a few minutes.

She called for another price check.

The line stacked up.

Finally, out of frustration, my wife said that she would just pay the difference because she just wanted to get out of the store.

As they were completing the sale, the cashier got a call. “Oh, she doesn’t care about the price check anymore,” was what my wife heard.

My wife was shocked. Of course she cared… at the very least, she cared that other people might have to go through this same problem. She told the cashier she should probably get it fixed so that other customers don’t have the same problem in the future.

The lesson? Empower your employees that face the customer to make decisions. Make it easy for them to make the customer experience the best experience possible.

There are many reasons why paperless office initiatives fail. I think that in order to truly understand why they fail, we need to understand the difference between how companies use paper and how individuals use paper.

I am a big proponent of the paperless office. I hate paper and wish that it would all go away.

With that said, I have two printers (one at my house and one at my office). I have stacks of paper on my desk and paper in my file cabinets. I love to read a book in print and not from my computer screen.

I should say that the stacks of paper on my desk are the reasons why I don’t like paper. I hate the way the are organized. I hate the way I have to find them. I just hate it.

The fact is, people use paper differently for different reasons. When we talk about paper that we use personally, we need to apply a different standard to that paper. We need to jot down notes. We need to highlight the way we are used to. We have been conditioned to expect paper to be the tangible proof that we are doing something.

A large company is different. It may be efficient enough for me to look through my one file cabinet and find a peice of paper (well, maybe not for me, but for most people). But, it is not practical for a company with 100 or more file cabinets to allow each employee that needs access to a file cabinet to have it.

It is like the difference between Mac and PC… you need to have the right tool for the job. I need my PC because so many people use it and I have to understand that technology. I need my Mac because a couple of my hobbies require it and a PC simply won’t do. (Although, if I could choose, I would choose my Mac hands down).

When considering moving to a paperless office and implementing a paperless workflow or even implementing a full blown document management system, we have to realize that there is the right tool for the job. It may never make sense for you to implement a database on your computer to manager your documents, but when we start talking about managing documents in an organization and we need to eliminate those information silos, a paperless document management strategy becomes a critical conversation.

Not long ago, I had the first of many round table discussions on why paperless office initiatives fail. I thought that I would share the notes of the discussion and solicit further discussion.

Here are the notes from the meeting. I am very curious to know what you think of the discussion. The goal was to identify what problems surrounding documents do companies face, what prevents those companies from working to increase those efficiencies and what can a company do to over come those problems.

I welcome further discussion here and I will be conducting these discussions in the future and if you would like to be involved, please let me know and I’ll send you an invite.

What problems are associated with documents in your business?
Document Retrieval
When retrieving a document in a business, the method of retrieval varies from document to document. Some sources of those documents are paper-based files in file cabinets or on desks (cars, briefcases, etc), Outlook client, on the web, in a database or other locations on a computer or network. It can only take one person to mess up the system. This retrieval causes problems with information being silo-ed, or segregated in your office. There are simply too many different systems and a lack of consistency even within the same systems. Priorities change about the reasons and way things have been filed.
Collaboration
Sharing documents for the purpose of collaboration is very difficult. It stems from the document retrieval, but is not limited there. There is a lack of continuity in the way people communicate. Often, there is limited access only one person at a time can use a document.

What is preventing us from creating greater efficiencies in these systems?
Need to have something tangible
Many people want something to touch, feel and markup. We are in the habit of seeing things a certain way and it is very hard for us to change the fact that we like to touch and feel our paper. This tangible nature of documents allows us to have signatures, mark-ups and other notations that we are accustomed to.
Security
Moving to a new system causes apprehension. We are not sure if the new system is secure. We are not sure if our information is safe from attack or from data loss.
Other people arent doing it yet
If we move to a paperless system, how do we interoperate with the people that are conducting business the old-fashioned way? No one really wants to be first we want to try something that is proven and not experimental.
Change is hard
We like the format our documents are in we want to preserve that and we dont know how to do it otherwise. It is very difficult to manage what we have and to have to learn something new, it takes too much effort. We simply cant visualize the benefits related to an increase in productivity. We perceive the change to be too expensive either too expensive because a new system is costly or because there are high switching costs. As a result, we have simply given up in making these changes.

So, how do we make these necessary changes?
The top down
In order to make this move, it has to be a shift in the culture of the company. The management must set the direction and develop a philosophy of efficiency. The leaders in the organization must develop a system via a document workflow. You simply cant automate a flawed system. You have to create a tangible/measureable ROI and prove that productivity will increase.
Address issues that keep us from moving on
We have to understand how success can help us increase our productivity. We need to know the feeling of what efficiency can bring to us. Bringing things to the lowest common denominator and not making change for the sake of change can help us. We need to establish and assurance that the data is safe and secure and understand that it may be far more costly for us not to make a change.

Please share your thoughts by commenting below. If you register and log in, I’ll be able to respond to your comments. Check back in a day or so and I’ll share my thoughts on these three questions.

When you have an associate of the month, do you run the risk of offending other associates?

Probably not.

I do think that if you save those associates a parking spot closer than your customers can park, you risk offending your customers.  

Take a look at Seth’s comments on this.

There are three types of people that tell you they don’t have any business problems.

Type 1 - People that don’t trust you enough yet to share that information.

Type 2 - People that are lying to themselves thinking that all is well.

Type 3 - The idiot that thinks he is as efficient as he can be.

Every business can improve, so therefore every business has some sort of problem. Don’t try to fool yourself in to thinking that you are as good as you can be.

Small Business and Franchise owners will find lots of useful tips BusinessWeek’s SmallBiz Tips.

One post I thought was unique had information on how to get a franchise loan even if you have “bankruptcies combined with lots of judgments and tax liens against you”- although it’s very tough. Lot’s of successful business owners once had bad credit- don’t let that kill a good idea.

The year’s biggest boors, buffoons, and blunderers. Learn from other’s mistakes. And laugh at them.

How do you define “paperless?” Are we ever really going to be “paperless?”

Even in the Star Wars world, there is not a complete banishment of paper. They don’t call it a piece paper… they call it a flimsy.

So, if in an advanced society, paper doesn’t go away, can we ever hope to be rid of paper?

I would imagine, at the earliest, it will be a few generations to see paper go the way of the typewriter (although there are still some of those still around, too).

When we talk about “paperless,” I believe that it is a misnomer. In my opinion, paperless is simply a euphemism for automating our processes. By reducing our dependences on paper through a workflow we can increase the efficiency by which we work.I think that “paperless” really means “less paper” and not “without paper.”

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.”

- Sir Ken Robinson

Thanks to Olivier for the pic and quote.

Corey Smith
Vice President of Innovation at Fisher’s Document Systems.