The Social Life of Information
I remember well the first time someone told me that the paperless office was coming. It was 1987, and I was a young manager in a customer service department of a Fortune 500 company talking to a records management expert. We were in the process of setting up a new office, and I was sketching out the locations of the file cabinets and quick-access racks that would hold customer files and copies of the myriad of forms required for taking and completing orders.
My company RME told me not to spend too much time worrying about where I was going to keep years and years of paper data. The paperless office was coming, she assured me. Everything would be kept on the computers - only the computers - and all of my paperwork would soon be a thing of the past.