December 18, 2012
On Tuesday, December 18, 2012 by Unknown 3 comments
Recently when I was giving seminar on “Paperless Organisation” to mixed group of senior managers and general managers from Cement Industry and Government Institutions, I have been discussed about vision towards paperless organisation, implementation methodology, tools & techniques and migration strategies. Few of the audience raised concern about possibilities of a paperless organisation, indeed which is true and in point of fact “Paperless Organisation” should be called as “Less Paper Organisation” and one of my slides in presentation is focused on “Without paper in an Organisation” which is summarised as Following:
Always paperless or digitisation, automation applies only to internal communication and not any outside communication, which may include communication with vendors, customers and institutions for statutory requirements. Even though most of the ERP’s made available with customer and vendor management functionalities through their online portals, still communication through paper media cannot be avoidable but it can be minimised.
Educate and support, train the people to "use monitors and avoid using paper who have problems like eye sight and aged, accustomed to read paper". Also organisation should provide better resolution or compatible screens for the people who have eye sight problems. Educate people to avoid taking prints in case of draft reading, printing of landscape pages or large width pages. Education and usage of system is the major risk to implement a document management system or collaboration system, automation system in any organisation.
New policies have adapted in an organisation on addressing the availability of papers at centralised location and non availability of paper in printers which can be accessed only after prior approval. Organisation is fully educated on when to use paper and measure the usage of paper. Also Organisation should be completely aware of policies and domestic laws to use Information act and authenticity of electronic & digital signatures effectively.
Even after considering and implementing all the above options still there will be many areas where paper cannot be avoided for our current environment and statutory requirements at least as on today.
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Yes, i too agree that there could be various challenges for an organization to transition from paper based to less paper / paper less organization. In percentage terms, i think, a start up company could achieve higher percentage of success than an established company transition to paperless. Often this could be classic example of business catching up with technology to achieve faster/smarter ROI.
ReplyDeleteI am sure paper is not going to go-away forever, so it is appropriate to call it "Less Paper organizations". There are some small success stories though. 10 years ago I never thought i could travel without a paper ticket. But today Indian Railways is saving tones of paper by introducing e-ticket that could be produced on an electronic device to validate the traveler.
At a broad level, if we try to separate the business environment into outside & within the organization and see what are the possibilities of implementing the strategies to go less paper, Indian Railways has done the outside part. They have provided an avenue where traveler, if chooses to, could go 100% paperless (no paper while booking, carrying the ticket and presenting it for validation ). They still have to support paper based tickets (are going to support for a very very long time ). I am sure all of us would be happy to see, the tones of paper that is being saved, scrolling on the IRCTC website.
Going paper less within the organization falls into a domain called ECM (Enterprise Content Management) & Case Management. Where it helps knowledge workers to perform their work electronically. Again mostly the interface between non-knowledge and knowledge workers could be paper. ECM provides various products to automatically capture the paper content into electronic objects. I am not sure what has been implemented or planned, to go "Less Paper" inside Indian Railways organization but these domains office very impressive features
@Vasu:
ReplyDeleteRightly Commented,
You are right about start up companies because any implementation is easier at beginning. You have given very good example of Indian Railways and for further reduction in usage of paper they need to provide extensive education to all their customers and again it is depends on customers and knowledge in using their electronic devices.
Organisations can achieve higher success rate when they implement within the it compared to outside because they will have similar culture across the organisation and as you said this can be achieved using integrated systems and tools like DMS (Document Management System), Workflow, ECM (Enterprise Content Management System) and etc.
The concept you have just picked up with unique title is very good
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