Paper doesn't dance

by Sean McGrath

November 9, 2007 —

So let me guess. You have lots of paper floating around your organization right?
Filing cabinets full of the stuff. Shelves bulging under the crushing weight
of forest and ink. Me too.

Now why is this so? Will all the computerization and digitization going on
in this world, why does all the paper persist? There are many reasons, not just
one. Today I am thinking about files specifically. You know the kind -- the
ones related to customers and such like. Containers that contain lots of separate,
useful pieces of information. Lots of separate pieces of paper of different
shapes and sizes. Paper clips used to tack smaller pieces of paper on to bigger
ones. Important notes written in pen on the margins on the front cover of the
file. Post-it notes slapped on liberally with important reminders, updated phone
numbers, scribbled questions...

Inveterate technologists cannot help but look at filing cabinets full of this
stuff and think about computerization. So much can be gained by computerization,
it is hard to resist! And yet, and yet...somehow many paper-centric systems
persist. It is not uncommon to find organizations running new IT systems in
which staff still habitually print everything out, put it on the paper file
and maintain them carefully in good old-fashioned filing cabinets.

I have seen this situation many times. I have also seen - many times - a tendency
amongst technologists to dismiss post-computerization paper mountains as forces
of habit. "People continue to hoard paper even after computerization",
so the theory goes "because they have always done it that way. Old habits
die hard."

Well, yes and no. For sure, I have seen situations where the persistence of
the paper mountain can be attributed to sheer force of habit. More often though
an important business reason underlies beneath the paper. Consider a paper file
that you are the sole owner and maintainer of. You put stuff in the paper file
and put it in the filing cabinet. Next week you take it out again and look at
it. Will anything have changed? Of course not. Paper doesn't change all by itself.
Humans need to act on it in order to change it.

Consider an electronic file that you are the sole owner and maintainer of.
You put stuff in the electronic file and put it on a disk. Next week you take
it out again and look at it. Will anything have changed?

Well, maybe. Let's see...there are umpteen possible ways in which the material
might not be the same as it was. Many more "attack vectors" if you
wish to think of it that way. Worse. The contents may be changed in small ways
that you cannot easily detect. Computers have a pervasive ability to delete
and overwrite files over and over again. On computers, files dance all the time.

If you are the nervous type or if the material is really important and especially
if it is up-the-steps-of-the-courthouse type important, better to have it on
paper. Paper doesn't dance. Okay, that is a simplification. Let me nuance that
a bit. Paper doesn't dance half as easily as electronic text does.

The paper mountains will stay with us until such time as write-only media become
as common as today's hard disks. We need storage sub-systems that never, ever
delete anything. Storage systems that automatically - at hardware level - ensure
that updates are stored as new versions and that delete operations are really
archive operations. To be widely adopted, we need the confidence that only legal
standing can bring to the evidential reliability of such devices.

I do not see that happening very soon but I don't see an alternative...other
than filing cabinets full of the stuff.

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