The vision of the paperless office continues to change as digital technology evolves. In fact, the future of the office is one that combines the paper and digital worlds in a seamless manner, not one in which paper is eliminated.
Responding to these changing market needs, technology companies are moving into the digital realm. Knowledge management and work flow process management have become a driving force within many organizations that are grappling with the task of improving core business processes in the enterprise.
The future of knowledge-sharing in the office is a solution that bridges the paper and digital chasm by linking paper gateways with the industry's leading messaging and collaboration platforms. Ease-of-use and a seamless integration with current technology are key to the success of this future.
Xerox is enhancing office productivity by transforming the role of office equipment from simple peripherals to intelligent gateways into customers' communication, document management, and applications infrastructures.
The last decade has seen exponential growth in the accessibility of network technology. Workstations and PCs on every desktop have been connected to LANs, enabling teams to share printing and file server resources; organization-wide e-mail enables effortless, near-instantaneous distribution of information across geographical boundaries; and the World Wide Web offers virtually limitless access to information and communication.
As connectivity increases, companies are faced with the challenge of managing the information on their networks and making their knowledge work harder for them. Many of the industry's largest vendors are adopting some form of knowledge management in an attempt to find and hold valuable information in an enterprise environment often cluttered with unstructured data.
Simultaneously, document management systems are gaining acceptance. Within these systems, indexing, search engines, and in particular the use of Web-based interfaces to the document repository, facilitate accessing documents even within chaotic multi-platform environments. As operating systems evolve, this trend will gain momentum, and digital documents-in whatever form-will become even easier to access.
However, as they drive to ensure effective access to corporate knowledge, companies are finding they face another problem-how to capture and manage the large amounts of 'knowledge' held on paper. The key to the success of document and knowledge management systems is to combine a highly reliable, scalable messaging and collaboration platform with powerful paper-to-digital document services.
With the increase in the use of networking technologies and the growth of collaborative computing, it was thought that paper use would decrease. However, the concept of the paperless office never really considered the range of human needs and preferences. While digital technology has delivered breakthroughs in quality and productivity for creating, sending and searching for documents, it falls short in other applications. For instance, hard copy is more easily read, skimmed and annotated. In addition, hard copy documents are easier to compare to other documents and share with others.
Extensive research conducted by Xerox on various office technologies concluded that end-users don't automatically use computers to interact with documents, but instead choose the form most conducive to the task at hand. As a result, far from making paper obsolete, the digital revolution has driven an ongoing growth in the amount of paper used in the office. End-users function simultaneously in a world of electronic and paper documents and documents may pass through electronic and paper forms several times during their life-cycles before being finalized.
The constant cycling of information between paper and digital worlds requires simple and seamless transition between the two. Currently, desktop and network printers make the transition from digital to paper simple and effective, but the same does not hold true for the paper-to-digital transition.
A seamless, networked, paper-to-digital transition allows a variety of paper-based work processes to run more efficiently, by addressing end-user needs of flexibility and accessibility while maintaining the mobility they currently enjoy, and providing an integrated platform for messaging, documents and workflow. Building on current infrastructures provides a simplicity and cost-savings not seen with past solutions.
What can today's solutions do for you? They can facilitate previously paper-driven functions that create bottlenecks within an organization, like tracking invoices or routing resumes. In the hiring process, these new applications enable streamlined end-to-end processing of resumes, accelerating the process and eliminating delays that often result in losing top candidates. Employee recruiting and hiring efforts are optimized by scanning, storing, managing and retrieving resumes in digital form. Invoicing is optimized in much the same way, by tracking paper-based invoices in digital form and routing the digital documents for approvals automatically.
The explosive growth of networked computing has put breakthrough capabilities in the hands of the average end-user. Certain tasks still require the use of paper and end-users will make their choices according to their own particular needs. By providing a seamless bridge from paper to digital and back, companies like Xerox honor end-user requirements, and accelerate as well as simplify overall business processes by offering a variety of options tailored to their immediate needs.
Xerox' ultimate goal is to improve the business process by delivering complete solutions. Looking to the future, Xerox will provide even broader and more simple access to services that enable the paper/digital transition, and will allow information to be fully and effectively used by organizations.