EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
OLIVIA ANGULO , HEAD OF GLOBAL IWS SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE ,
XEROX CORPORATION
While it is fair to say that the growing trend of BYOD and the wider use of mobile devices resulted in a steady decline in paper use in the pandemic , and that Digital Transformation processes accelerated noticeably , according to a Xerox study of the Future of Work , what would have happened in the next five years has happened in just two years ( 2020 – 2021 ). The reality is that the paperless office is still a chimera for most , and it is confirmed that paper will never cease to exist .
It is not that we lack the technology to stop using paper , it is that we do not want to get rid of paper in our daily activities . One of the greatest barriers to the transformation of paper-based processes to a paperless one is the resistance to change and the co-existence of generations that currently exist in the labor market , while some prefer to continue using paper and even reading a physical book , others want everything digital . Despite the view that paper workflows are an inhibitor of efficiency and growth , people continue to use paper because that is what they have always done and there are mental processes that work better using it .
In fact , one of the key findings from a Quocirca digitization and workflow automation study was that paper remains a key element for many companies . Quocirca interviewed 200 organizations in the US , UK , France and Germany , and respondents reported that 27 % of business processes are done on paper . The main reasons cited for using paper are : physical firms ( 55 %), customers and suppliers require it ( 48 %) and , most notably , that staff prefer paper ( 41 %).
Businesses receive , produce and share content exponentially every minute . Every day they face the challenge of how to organize , share and analyze the information that enters and leaves their organizations from diverse and disparate sources .
This has created an urgent requirement to improve operational efficiency and drive growth through Digital Transformation to be more efficient and move away from paper use somewhat . This is recognized by eight out of 10 ( 80 %) of the business process automation leaders surveyed by Quocirca , who said that document digitization is very important to their control and information management strategy .
Businesses must plan their information management strategy to seamlessly connect the worlds of physical ( paper ) and digital data , to extract the most value from all their data in the shortest time possible . But less than half of the organizations that participated in the Quocirca study ( 44 %), have implemented policies to manage both paper and digital information , even with the intention of doing so .
The challenge for organizations , regardless of their size , is to have from their business partners the real alternatives that allow them to achieve this successful conjunction between the physical and the digital , such as having printing devices that allow you to be a link in workflows to different cloud platforms such as : OneDrive , Google Drive , etc ., and / or share them with other critical processes in the organization such as accounts payable using a connector or APP for your key applications , transforming paper into a digital document , such as a Concur connector on the multifunctional .
All the above require computer security protocols that provide certainty and reliability to companies – and this should not stop there since we also have to think about the biosecurity of employees , the devices also allow the multifunctional to be used from their smart phones without contact . These actions generate value to organizations and allow them to live the real interaction between the physical and digital environments .
34 INTELLIGENTCIO LATAM www . intelligentcio . com