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.

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