Document management: from paperless office to parliamentary privilege

Document management: from paperless office to parliamentary privilege

Paul Quigley,

Editorial Director

Despite the era of digital signatures, e-everything and paperless offices, recent events in the wider world of content management demonstrated the enduring power of paper.

The oversight of a piece of paper with the signature of a magistrate on it was at the epicentre of the Greengate debacle over the apparent unlawful entry of the State into Parliament brought into sharp focus the ongoing reliance of proving veracity or otherwise on the basis of the presentation of paper documents. Had the presentation of an email, or a digital electronic document formed the basis of the current e-government/eGIF initiatives, then perhaps the warrant so obviously lacking could have been sent to the Speaker’s inbox directly, thus avoiding any confusion over who signed what, who did or didn’t have the authority to sign off that and the other. And yet, the significance of waving around a piece of paper purporting to grant access all areas in the House of Commons shows how important it is to ‘publish’ a written statement in the form of something that can be seen, can be touched, can be borne witness to and yes – cannot be replicated without major difficulty. Indeed, the data security aspects of the incident, whatever your views on the rights and wrongs of what happened, clearly demonstrate that the reliance on paper may well be with us for some considerable time yet, despite the wonders of modern e-books, e-signatures, and total e-documentation. Even the digitisation, scanning and printing back to paper of such vital documents is a relatively long-winded process in times such as these when timings seem to make the difference between proof and no-proof, right or wrong, early or late, the list goes on…

Clearly, it’s a classic case again of horses-for-courses. Whilst standard commercial, transaction-based processes are benefiting massively from electronic document management, there are quite clearly many instances where nothing but paper will do – proof of exam certificates, for example, birth and marriage certificates, cash even, all are non-digital and even where digital replicas of these exist, many private and public sector organisations will still insist of seeing, and verifying the original paper-ness of the purported facts.

So is it totally unreasonable to expect the world to move from a paperless office situation to a paperless world scenario? No more books, libraries, just banks upon banks of monitors and servers to read Beedle the Bard, the Bible or the Best Bits of Brigitte Bardot and Billy Bunter?

Who can say.

Ultimately, as has been the case in the world of music, there has been a definite shift back to analogue warmth and fidelity from the cold and harsh brutality of digital audio. A common consensus now seems to prevail that a happy hybrid of the two will prosper going forwards in those areas of digital asset management. So too then, perhaps, in the wider context of document management. Whilst electronic document management will take care of a vast proportion of textual and graphical information management, there will always be instances where paper-based documents have their role.