For decades, pundits have trumpeted the promise of a paperless society. They forecast far fewer dead trees, and an end to the headaches – and costs – inherent in the printing, distribution and filing of paper documents.
Skeptics will rightly point out that paper is still very much with us. Yet, the paperless society was always something of a misnomer. It was really all about unlocking the information trapped in all those discrete pieces of paper, and making that information more widely available in digital form. No longer locked away in file cabinets and desk drawers, modern digital documents have unleashed the value of intellectual property that can now be authored, shared, reviewed, revised, disseminated, stored, retrieved and leveraged by knowledge workers throughout the global enterprise.
