The Paperless Office - Login to stop logging

Pick up a copy of the local newspaper and you’re likely to be saturated with several liftouts and hundreds of pages for the sake of a couple of pages or sections that are relevant to you.  That’s a lot of wasted paper. 

But waste doesn’t stop with our newspapers.  We often refer to electronic media having such a high “signal to noise ratio”.  This basically means that there is too much clutter, which can obscure the real message.   Watch television or listen to radio to find information and you may find yourself flicking endlessly between channels.  Even email, which was new a decade ago, is beginning to suffer from spam.   Finding the information you need takes time, and in today’s business world time means money.

We belong to a generation of new content consumers blessed with a new information technology.  The beauty of the web as an information media for us is that it represents a giant forest of information that we can tap into.  The web has come along way as an interactive media since the days of the simple “point and click” surfing experience with its banners and pop-ups.  Search engines and metadata allow us to directly find the information we need without getting lost. The web is now a serious business tool.

Just as we need to manage a forest, we also need to manage web content to keep it useful.  An overdose of irrelevant information can kill the interest of a user just like the 1080 poison used in forestry kills native animals. 

Much of the web’s usefulness to business can be directly attributed to the ability for users to log in and receive customised information.  This helps to filter and prioritise information to ensure we get only what we need to know. 

For content creators, content management systems like Freestyler, allow us to login, draft and publish and even recycle documents completely electronically, as well as profile content so that users can customise their views of it.  From there, content and notifications can be distributed via the web, email or SMS.

In an ideal world, one would like to think that in using web technologies we are not only helping to streamline business processes, but promoting a fantastic electronic resource that helps to reducing paper consumption and in turn reduce the strain on our beautiful forests and help curb climate change.

Datalink's efforts aren't confined to the digital world, however.  Step into our offices and you'll find the signs of change everywhere.  We reduce and recycle as much as we can, from paper recycling to printer ink cartridges and electronic e-waste.  We even encourage low impact travel.

Who knows, with the paperless office within sight, maybe one day logging in will phase logging - at least for paper pulp - out.

At least at Datalink we'd like to think so.  Contact us for a website sustainability audit.

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