While emails are my holiday greetings, when traveling for leisure or business, I am often surprised that the only available communication material to bring home is still paper-based. If you are lucky there is a memory stick. But even then, the temptation is to print it out later in order to classify it all properly, when arriving back at the office. Having said that, e-notebooks, i-pads, smart phones, Kindles, have all emerged as prominent tools for communicating, reading and planning digitally – and they are being embraced in vast numbers in the private sector, both personal and business – as in the BYOD syndrome in enterprise.
But what of the public sector? What about the vast amounts of paperwork still generated by local authority departments, quasi public organizations such as banks, hospitals and post offices and, indeed, governments themselves? As an example, recent newspaper reports claiming that the UK Government could save the British taxpayer £70 billion by 2020 if it banned paper and went digital certainly gives pause for thought. The Policy Exchange think tank has urged the Government to eliminate paper and do everything online unless the activity requires face-to-face interaction. It found that even when people apply for a passport online, the Passport Office still prints the application off and sends it back to be signed. They also say every day the Crown Prosecution Service prints one million sheets of paper while two articulated trucks loaded with paperwork pull into the Vehicle Licensing Authority.
But why is there still such a reluctance to switch? Does it imply digital encryption and authentication is still not considered secure enough for adoption? And on a personal level, am I really prepared to lose the comforting reassurance of that particular sheet of paper to the less personal and potentially more vulnerable, electronic version? Many reasons can be mooted, but it might after all just be a matter of a change of mindset.
Whatever it is, with some of the pro-arguments going around, particularly if financial savings are a real prospect, is it not time to go fully digital? My pinboard cries for cards, but my desk certainly thinks so!
