May we ask you how you are reading this text? On your monitor? Or on paper?

You probably read shorter articles like this one on your monitor. But you probably frequently push the print-button to read articles that are longer than one page. Over 80% of Europeans and US-Americans do the same.

Paper can be touched – and in the truest sense of the word, grasped – while digital documents will always remain virtual. They can’t be touched, i.e. by penciling comments on them, paper-clipping notes to them or by personally marking the most interesting spots. Then there’s a psychological factor: the fear of losing data. Even if you can’t find the piece of paper with the cover letter right at this moment – you know it exists and you know you will be able to find it!

Such arguments are also used to explain a paradox. According to a study by Price Waterhouse Cooper, paper consumption in companies with e-mail systems has increased by 40%. People who receive an e-mail print it out. The consequences for companies are significant. According to Hewlett-Packard, all companies in the world spend approximately five percent of their total income exclusively on printing. Over two-thirds, according to a survey sponsored by Lexmark, don’t even know what their printing costs are. But a company with 100 employees prints around 100,000 sheets of paper per month – resulting in costs of between 40,000 and 120,000 euros.

Every year, nearly 700 billion sheets of paper are unnecessarily printed. In Europe alone, this means costs of 1.4 billion euros per year. Circa 655,000 tons of CO2 are consumed in the production of paper – for nothing.

In German offices alone, an estimated 800,000 tons of paper are printed per year. If one were to load a freight train with this amount of paper, it would be 600 kilometers long and consist of 40,000 wagons. Packaging artist Christo would be able to wrap the Deutsche Reichstag circa 100,000 times with this amount of material.

But there are highly sensible and efficient alternatives to this, for example, deployment of Electronic Document-Management-Systems (EDMS). EDMSs promote intelligent document-handling, because they use another approach in the creation of printed material: while the conventional distribution principle was always “print and distribute”, EDMS works according to the principle “distribute and print”. Documents are stored digitally as long as possible, then distributed, and only then, printed. This substantially reduces distribution and printing costs.

There is a deep need of making our thoughts and work visible. We work in an analog way, but live in a digital world.

Should we change or should we combine the advantages of a paper-based office with those advantages of a paperless office? I would prefer the second option.

It makes no sense to print every fact sheet or white paper that seems interesting. We can store these documents in an intelligent Document-Management-System (DMS). DM-Systems have great advantages over bookshelves! But we do need to emphasize key points of our thoughts and working results with printed flyers or papers. In this point we should remain as we are: analog in a digital world!