The paperless chase

By BILL DURYEA
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 11, 2002

Business sages of old who foresaw the "paperless office'' could not have forseen the future: Point . . . click . . . print. Repeat.

Enron made its billions trading energy contracts -- pieces of paper, really.

Turned out the profits existed only on paper.

And when it all fell apart late last year, an honest-to-goodness paper trail detailed the screwy accounting practices.

What's with all this paper, anyway?

Weren't we supposed to be working in "paperless offices" by now? The "office of the future" would be paperless. That was the promise in the early '70s. Back then, paperless meant no more clutter. Paperless meant freedom from the stigma of a stagnant, ink-splotched medium. Paperless meant communication as quick as a stream of electrons.

Above all, paperless meant progress.

Well, here we are in the future and the most potentially damaging evidence in the growing Enron scandal met its end not at the touch of a computer's delete key, but in the whirring blades of a shredding machine. Shredding? That's sooo Iran-Contra.

Just as the signature corporate scandal of the 21st century is but a variation on the old pyramid scheme, it seems we are a society with high-tech dreams and low-tech tastes.

We yearn for the "paperless office" -- it's still the promised land for paper-swamped bureaucracies and software manufacturers who tout their document management programs for small offices -- but we consume twice as much paper now than before the invention of the personal computer.

So what became of our best intentions?

The frumpy husband

Human memory is not as reliable as a computer's, so it's a little difficult to pin down who first uttered "paperless office." Most everyone agrees though that it had to be somebody at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. The leading suspect is George E. Pake, who headed the center at its creation in 1970.

The scientists Pake hired pursued a variety of technological advancements -- sending electronic mail via networked desktop computers, for example -- that Xerox hoped would create the "office of the future."

"I don't know how much hard copy I'll want in this world," Pake said in 1975, looking ahead to a time when easily accessible computer files made paper less necessary.

Not exactly a smoking-gun quote.

Now 77 and living in a new community in Tucson that caters to retired academics and professionals, Pake doesn't remember that prediction. Paperlessness was never high on the center's agenda, he says.

"Some of us didn't think the paperless office would ever be a possibility," Pake says, sitting at a desk mounded high with tax documents. "The first thing we did was invent the laser printer."

If they were looking to limit paper use, that clearly wasn't going to help. In 1974, watching a prototype in operation, the researchers learned the first lesson of human-printer interaction: We can't keep our hands off each other.

"First thing we observed was everybody wanted to make a copy of everything," Pake says. "If at the push of a button you could get a high-quality hard copy, there's a great temptation to do it."

If the innovators of the concept weren't sold on it, why then did the public become so enamored of it? Maybe, argues one researcher, because we've wanted it for so long.

Dr. Abigail J. Sellen, a senior research scientist with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol, England, co-authored The Myth of the Paperless Office, which was published in November by the MIT Press.

"It may go as far back as Thomas Edison," Sellen, 40, says of the man whose communications patents included the stock ticker and the telegraph. "He began to talk in terms of getting rid of interoffice memos and the need to send letters."

Since then, each technological advancement, be it the telephone, the Internet or the electronic book has been heralded as the death of paper, that "symbol of the past," Sellen says.

"There's been a perception that people who like paper are old," she says. "Working in an office stuffed with paper, it just doesn't look very good."

Paper may be like that frumpy husband who doesn't look so hot at the office Christmas party but comes in handy when the sink needs work. We like having paper around; it does things computers still can't.

Watching office workers use paper and computers, Sellen and her co-author, professor Richard Harper of the University of Surrey, discovered that "people are using paper for really good reasons."

Somebody would receive a long document attached to an e-mail, say. "As soon as they get it, they print it." The reason? To do anything with it -- to compare the content with other documents or to mark it up for future reference -- requires having a physical copy that can be spread out on a desk, Sellen says.

She calls it "knowledge work," and it's very hard to do on a computer screen that displays one document at a time and doesn't permit the user to make margin notes. Paper, on the other hand, is portable, reliable and easy to use in groups. Imagine the expense and logistical hassle of trying to get 30 people to follow the boss' speech using computers instead of a few pages of inked paper.

That explains the resilience of paper, but why is paper use increasing?

Harper and Sellen cite a study that showed paper usage increased 40 percent after the introduction of e-mail. One e-mail sent to a dozen people suddenly becomes 12 hard copies in the 12 file drawers.

More of us get that corporate e-mail now because more of us are involved in "knowledge work," as Sellen calls it. That means more of us are pulling documents off the Internet and more of us are printing those documents on the department's laser printer.

And forgetting them.

And printing them again.

The paper graveyard

You know where those forgotten reams of paper end up, all those forwarded e-mails with jokes about Monica Lewinsky that you just had to share with the guys in your over-40 basketball league?

They end up in the maw of the 30-foot-long industrial shredder at A-1 Document Destruction. During the course of an average week, Alan Ball and his crew of three push 45 tons of office paper through the shredder located in a warehouse just northwest of downtown St. Petersburg.

It comes out the other end in jagged half-inch strips that look like crinkle-cut french fries. Then they're clumped in giant bales, destined for a recycling company.

"It's never-ending," Ball, a jaunty former soccer player with a scarcely diluted Cockney accent. "You get it clear and all of a sudden the trucks come in and you can't see the floor."

The paper comes by the truckload from businesses such as Florida Power and from the Pinellas County government. Recently, the Florida International Museum sent over a few score boxes of unused admission tickets. Medical records are 50 percent of Ball's business. His company is one of about 11 shredding outfits in the Tampa Bay area. Recent legislative changes to combat identity fraud have increased the demand for document destruction among businesses anxious to ensure their customers' personal information doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

Ask Ball what he thinks of the "paperless office" and he chuckles.

"Yeah sure, and computers are going to speed everything up."

Field of reams

The average office worker now uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper a year. Fortunately, the average tree produces 12,000 sheets. As long as there are more trees than office workers, no problem.

Clearly, there's a "conundrum," as Sellen, the Hewlett-Packard researcher, puts it, for companies such as Hewlett-Packard.

"Most of their revenue comes from paper," she says, "but they're trying to change the world by creating technology that will replace paper."

Go to Hewlett-Packard's Web site and you can find high-speed printers as well as $500 scanners that will help you "create the paperless office" by converting your paper documents into electronic ones. Printers and scanners are produced by the same division of the company.

The company's strategy might appear a bit Jekyll and Hydeish, but it's part of finding the right uses for paper and the right uses for the electronic counterpart. The challenge, says Sellen, is to "change the mindset. Maybe we should be looking at paper as a good thing."

For now, there is no technology that improves on certain ways people use paper. You can't, for example, look at multiple documents on the screen and move text from one to the other simply by pointing, Sellen says.

But computers are exactly the right solution for archiving the thousands of pages we slip into manila folders and forget about.

Lee Caldwell, the vice president and chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard's Imaging and Printing Division, hasn't read Sellen's book, but he agrees that the future lies in the fluid conversion of paper to digital and back again.

"The hard copy is the link between the electronic and the physical universe," he says.

That is, until we come up with a replacement for paper that still behaves like paper.

Dan Swinehart, a principal scientist at Palo Alto Research Center, says his colleagues have been working for decades on just such a replacement. Swinehart calls it "rewritable paper."

It's as thin as paper, as flexible as paper, as readable as paper, but it can be written on repeatedly. A company called Gyricon, which spun off of the center, is trying to bring the technology to market in the form of reusable signs for retailers.

"The key to it is that you don't need to supply power to sustain the image," he says. "This is hardware. It's getting right down to the way matter behaves. It's not the same kind of linear thinking involved in software."

In the meantime, let this news release from Xerox, dated last Tuesday, speak for the current state of paper usage:

"Supported by hundreds of highly trained people and thousands of high-tech printers, Xerox Corporation is primed to produce millions of documents to connect people with the information they need during the 2002 Olympic Winter Games."

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