The Decline of Paper in Business: The Reasons

Authors: Jim Lundy, Mike Anderson Date: December 11, 2012

Topic: Content Management Research Note Number: 2012-43

Issues: What trends are impacting content and how it is managed?

How will content management technologies and architectures evolve?

Summary: Display technology, tablet computers, and software applications are contributing to the end of paper as a critical part of business processes.

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Since the beginning of civilized society people have used paper to communicate information and conduct business. Now, digital technology is poised to make documents electronic in a growing majority of these cases. In this research note, we review the reasons why the use of paper in business will diminish over time.

Breaking the Barriers to the Paperless Business

Technology has made steady progress in allowing business to replace its paper documents with digital counterparts (see Figure 1). From mainframe email to word processing to enterprise content management (ECM), the document basis of business activity has been going digital. The key remaining needs include:

Ubiquitous and portable high-quality document viewing
Simple document sharing
Acceptance of digital signatures

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