Books reviews, current events, and other musings

 
Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper’s The Myth of the Paperless Office explores the reasons why paper documents continue to play such a major role in the modern workplace, despite the information technology revolution. They analyze how office workers utilize paper, the advantages that paper provides, and what happened when specific companies attempted to reduce paper consumption.

As we’ve all observed, paper documents simplify many common tasks. For example, printouts are very helpful when you read one document while writing another, record edits and comments in a document’s margins, or discuss a document at a meeting. The tangible nature of paper lets you spread documents across your desk, reorganize papers, or shuffle though them, all of which assist the aggregation of ideas from multiple sources.

Sellen and Harper classify documents as “hot”, “warm”, or “cold”, depending on how they’re being used. Hot documents are those that you’re currently reading or updating. Warm documents are the ones that you’ve used recently or expect to need in the near future. The cold documents are not being used at the moment, though you need to archive them for the future. The authors suggest that people prefer paper versions of the hot and warm documents, while it’s better to store cold documents digitally.

They examine case studies of paper usage in various offices. Their overall conclusion is that successful computerization efforts must consider the entire day-by-day office procedures, to integrate the technology changes with the work processes and data flow. For example, an attempt to replace a sale force’s notebooks with a central database ran into difficulties, since the notebooks contained private information about the customers, which the account managers were reluctant to record in a semi-public area.

Overall, I’d give the book a mixed review. It has some worthwhile ideas, but there’s too much repetition and uninteresting detail.
posted by Julian at 2:00 PM