The Myth of the Paperless Office.

• Author: Pemberton, J. Michael

TITLE: The Myth of the Paperless Office

AUTHOR: Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper

ISBN: 0-262-19464-3

PUBLISHER: The MIT Press

PUBLICATION DATE: 2002

LENGTH: 231 pages

PRICE: $24.95

SOURCE: Publisher, bookstores, Amazon.com

In The Myth of the Paperless Office, two technologically savvy authors attempt to answer a long-standing, often-contentious question: Why does paper persist? Neither card-carrying Luddites nor technophobes with a regressive agenda, the authors are alumni of Xerox PARC, that company's information technology think tank in Palo Alto, California. Their work is valuable to information professionals in that it may lead to new insight about how humans handle and process information.

Sellen and Harper wanted to understand why the vision of the "paperless office" (first proclaimed in Business Week 1975) has failed to materialize--even in large, technology-rich organizations. Why do information and knowledge workers consume ever-larger amounts of office-grade paper? Even in environments awash in information technology, the researchers continually encountered stacks of paper and folders on desks and filing cabinets (centralized and personal) and printers turning out large volumes of documents. At the same time, it was clear that paper as a medium has numerous drawbacks (e.g., cost to store/retrieve, poor use of space, hard to update, misfiling).

Sellen and Hughes undertook a variety of research projects in diverse organizations, such as Xerox, the International Monetary Fund, London Air Traffic Control Center, police departments, a European chocolate factory, UKComm, and a communications technology firm. They took surveys, conducted interviews, and spent many hours in direct observation of people creating and using information.

As their research progressed, the authors realized that paper and digital technology each has certain central "affordances" the other lacks. That is, one "afforded" capabilities, functions, and conveniences that the other could not. Such differences revealed themselves in many ways (see chart).

In reading their interesting work, it is important to realize that the authors do not focus purely on recordkeeping systems--electronic or hardcopy--and the staff associated with them. Instead, the groups studied were mostly knowledge workers. Findings by Sellen and Hughes support earlier studies, which show that knowledge workers use as much as 300 percent more paper than the average worker. Why? Because...