Every organization, including yours, is living in an age of digital transformation. To thrive, innovate, be productive and keep everyone – from customer to employee and beyond – happy, easy, user-friendly and ubiquitous access to the right data and information is key.
Are you ready? Many organizations think they are. But then: why is there still so much paperwork? It’s expensive, demoralizing, unproductive and slow. No one wants it so it’s time to stop paperwork dead in its tracks before it brings your organization to a hold.
Forget the paperless dream – start from your goals and those of your stakeholders
Becoming more agile in the ways we capture and use information, from input to effective value creation is paramount. And it requires moving away from paper.
However, the paperless office, let alone organization, for now is not the goal as such, it should be a ‘guideline’, a desire and a commitment, forcing us to look at, among others,
- where paper is slowing our businesses, people, stakeholders, processes and goals down,
- where it leads to bad customer experience and frustration/inefficiency of other stakeholders such as employees,
- where it sits in the way of unlocking and realizing value from the information we already have and could use to create business and stakeholder value when it’s digitized.
Some call going paperless a dream. And for quite some time it will continue to be. We know paper will (have to) continue to co-exist with digital for various reasons but it’s time to turn a dream into a mandate or intention to build the digitized foundations of the digital business.
Removing the slowness: prioritizing and commitment to reduce paperwork
The question is not (just) how we can get rid of the paper. But how to get rid of all the negative effects of paperwork and those slow paper-based processes, your worst enemies in this digital first economy. And how to make sure that the paper you still need in various cases enters your information workflows as soon as possible where it matters.
Why? Because how you manage information and let your organization focus on creating value based upon it is the present and future of your business success, especially since information and the access to it is becoming a crucial economic good as such.
Instead of ‘dreaming’ to go paperless maybe 2016 could be about a more tangible and possible goal: get the paperwork out of the way and remove/digitize paper where it delivers no value and, instead, is counterproductive and obstructive.
If we even just look at the sheer size of the costly paperwork mountain and the lack of digitization in areas where paper and digital/digitized information should/could co-exist we certainly have a year of work.
The question is whether you are ready to make a commitment to your employees, customers and partners to get paperwork out of their way? Grow your business. Shrink the paperwork mountains. Start by looking at your business and asking the right questions. The infographic below, from our partner Kodak Alaris, who is obviously all about helping organizations to speed up digital transformation by getting paper out of the way, might help you reflect on one of the questions: that of the bottom line.
Top image purchased under license from Shutterstock
