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N. Nagaraj

Files, accounts, statements, letters ... the computer is handling all this and much more.

What is your idea of an `office'? What does the word bring to your mind first? If at all you thought of a desk with some files and an `in' tray and an `out' tray, then admit it — you have been working for more than five years now.

How does your office look now? The same way that it did five years back? What has changed, and what hasn't?

These days, a typical workstation contains just a typical workstation. Everything that you need (or for that matter, even want) is available through or from your computer systems which are the main drivers towards moving towards paperless offices.

The main function that a computer took over that went towards saving paper was word processing. In the first instance, it was much easier to make corrections. Additionally, the moment one was able to save documents as files in the computer, and make them portable through disks, there was no need to make paper copies — one just saved a copy to a backup disk.

Internal communication is also easily managed through the use of e-mail and intranet. Collaborative tools and software have also made the task of working together on a document easier and even across different locations. The evolution of collaborative work in the electronic era is interesting. In the first stage, people would email documents to each other and have a `track changes' option turned on to indicate which of their original statements have been altered. The problem with this system was that it was very tough to collate all the copies of the documents. In the second stage of development, the sending of a certain number of copies of the document by email has been done away with. All one has to do is to open a new `project' to collaborate on a document. This document is put up at a protected intranet area where only people authorised to collaborate will even be able to access it. Different people are given different rights — some are allowed only to view, some are allowed only to comment, and some can be allowed to make changes. Of course, all this activity is logged, and therefore there is no question of ownership of decisions.

In the latest stage of collaborative work, the advent of efficient multimedia streaming combined with more bandwidth and better quality of service has enabled people to really collaborate, as though they were all in the same room. Collaborative tools no longer include only sharing documents, tracking changes and logging activity. People can see each other, talk to each other, demonstrate, use a whiteboard, use a chat service, use annotating services to take topic slightly offline, and last but not least, take stock of opinion by using different kinds of polling. To do all this, one just schedules a `meeting' and puts up a copy of the document for review, choosing different tools to be used. The best thing is that only people invited to the meeting can participate and even know what's going on.

Apart from the advantage of `real' collaboration, a major gain is the confidentiality. Paper files/documents were notorious for turning up at the competitor's office, not because someone involved in the decision-making leaked the documents, but because the document was just seen by someone along the line handling all the paperwork. Paper was generated in the office not only for communication but also for accounts. And this citadel of paper generation was attacked by a whole slew of accounting and spreadsheet software that made the accounting function a breeze. Finance managers could easily see the state of their funds and cash with the clichéd `single click of a mouse'.

Though many companies insist on paper vouchers with the advent of new technologies in storage, back-up and recovery, some companies, at least in the infotech sector, have moved to a model in which all requests are sent through forms provided in the intranet, which can be sent to the relevant person for clearance or instructions.

The final bastion of paper in offices is commercial transactions with the outside world — contracts, invoices, bills, cheques, purchase orders and so on. These are also moving towards non-paper media driven by networks using encrypted communication, digital signatures and certificates, Internet banking and other such technologies.

There are now only two things that an office requires — technology, and ... people!

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