The Paperless Office has Arrived

For years, the paperless office has been like the sasquatch. You’d hear about it and read about it, but nobody had actually seen one. One day, as four members of the GlueCrew struggled with the task of loading paper into the office’s only printer, it occurred to me that IT Glue is a paperless office. We have no filing cabinets. One printer. No photocopier. Fax machine? May as well have a mimeograph at that point. We have achieved the mythical, magical paperless office. It’s beautiful.

Chances are your clients are still buried in paper – printers, copiers, filing cabinets, and of course those cardboard boxes filling entire storage rooms. But there’s a very good reason we’ve cut out paper. Let me explain.

Why go paperless?

Most businesses cannot envision a paperless environment. First of all, there’s a lot of legacy paperwork, but even if you started a new business from scratch today, the idea would seem insane to most. First, you have to understand why you would want a paperless office in the first place.

It’s really about managing the flow of information. Paper is physical, which the information that’s on a piece of paper only exists in that one place where the paper is. Simple, right? But a digital document is wherever you need it. You can transfer knowledge and information anywhere in the world, in real time. You can collaborate with people on the other side of the world just as easily as people on the other side of the room.

That’s efficiency. That’s power.

Apps

To go paperless, you need apps. There is a convergence going on right now where mobile-style computing is increasingly available for business users. Communication is done via Slack, VoIP has replaced phones, documents signed electronically are legal, and there’s an app for everything else you can think of. Use Expensify to handle your expenses, and you won’t need to save receipts – just snap a picture on your phone. Task management, content management, CRM, HR…there is a digital solution to every paper problem.

IT Glue

IT Glue is the app for documentation. We document everything in there – SOPs, vendor info, contacts, all of our assets, our roles and responsibilities, and more. The objective is to get to the point where no important information is locked in anybody’s head – it’s all in IT Glue. And it’s easy to find, so no shoulder-tapping, and no guessing where a vital piece of information might be found.

People used to talk about the paperless office like it is an end. It’s not; it’s a means. The end objective of going paperless – or at least dramatically reducing your paper usage – is to run a highly-efficient organization where information flows seamlessly to where it is needed, when it is needed, unburdened by the constraints of paper, and of information locked inside people’s heads.

Getting there just requires the use of modern cloud-based tools, and a willingness to move beyond the paper paradigm.

IT Glue is a documentation platform that helps you to streamline your processes, record and organize information, and reduce the amount of time your techs waste looking for information. IT Glue’s partners report efficiency gains almost immediately after launching the platform. Watch the demo to find out more.

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