Whatever happened to the 'paperless' society? Predictions that businesses would largely be paperless by now have gone unmet. While there has been considerable progress, it's not as much as some would have liked or expected.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: STRATEGY

Back in 1978, before the personal computer was much more than a gleam in Bill Gates' eye, University of Illinois Prof. F.W. Lancaster wrote an academic paper suggesting that, by the dawn of the 21st century, developed nations like the United States and Canada would be living in a "paperless society," in which electronic delivery and sharing of documents would be the norm.

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Lancaster, who taught at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, came to the subject as a librarian and information systems specialist. As such, his immediate concern was the library world and its proliferating costs for producing and storing scholarly literature. But his vision--dubbed by one writer "his own library Sputnik"--resounded around the information world and became part of the societal lexicon.

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Clearly, Lancaster's notion hasn't come to pass; paper is still very much with us. But its usage is being reduced on a variety of fronts, many of which promise significant benefits to businesses large and small (see box on page 20).

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In some ways, the battle between traditional paper-based processes and digital ones is and will remain at the center of wide-ranging debates between different philosophies and different generations.

There may be no better example of these conflicting forces than the crisis in print media, especially newspapers. Most large U.S. newspapers are in deep financial trouble and trying to forge a balance between serving traditional readers with a conventional printed newspaper and satisfying a growing legion of online-only readers

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Most of this online group is young and has rejected newspaper subscriptions--and expects content to be free. Several national publications, including the august Christian Science Monitor, are now available only online.

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At the rear of the paperless movement are industries such as mortgage lending and health care, where traditions run deep and paper still rules. Electronic document management firms are offering solutions to those fields, but inertia is high and progress to shed paper is often slow.

For finance people, the compelling bullet points for a paperless office are cost savings, accuracy and efficiency--music to the ears of any chief financial officer. But initial system costs can be high, and if suppliers and critical procedures aren't paperless, the advantages may quickly dissipate.

A recent Statistics Canada assessment of the impact of information and communications technologies found shifting behavioral patterns: Businesses have been spending more on computer equipment and supplies, even as their prices have dropped. Yet consumption of paper for printing and writing alone more...