Text Lena Loheim Kangevik Illustration Tove Hennix
“The paperless office is just about as plausible as the paperless toilet,” says Daniel Akenine, National Technology Officer at Microsoft, to open the discussion about the paperless office.
“Maybe that’s a something of a flippant comment, but a certain level of paper usage will continue for a long time. Also, there are trends in paper just like in everything else. Just look at the LP. It was expected to disappear but it’s on the way back. There’s something physical about paper that a monitor can’t replace.”
Creating the paperless office is thus not the same as doing away with paper completely. But paperless offices are on the increase, and the benefits are indisputable.
“The biggest benefit of the digital office is that there’s much better access to information,” says Daniel Akenine. “It’s also easier to share digital information and it costs nothing to copy.”
The paperless office is faced with the challenge of processing documents’ metadata. Semantics and finding good programs that can categorise documents will thus be an increasingly important tool for the effective paperless office.
“When we save a document, we need to do so much more than simply save it. We need to link it to other files, we need to find systems to see who last viewed it, what the document contains, and so on. All of this is to help with searches. For example, if I find a document and see that you created it, and I trust you, it becomes more valuable to me. Smart systems like this are currently on the drawing board at IT companies.”
But IT is not just about the paperless office. Daniel Akenine spends a lot of time working on future scenarios.
“IT will spread out from the computer to a large number of devices all around us. We won’t just be using a keyboard and mouse. We’ll work with IT in a totally different way than we do today. IT will work for you in the background rather than at your command.”
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