As someone who has spent most of his career in report creation and management (specifically in financial asset management), I find the current state of enterprise reporting in flux. In finance, most documents are still laid out for print (PDFs, Word Docs, and even PowerPoints), but users are printing them less frequently and viewing them either online or on their tablets, and IMO the user experience leaves a lot to be desired.<p>At the same time, there is so much tooling and infrastructure out there for print, that change is slow. There is a whole layer of increasingly senior managers from my generation who grew up with Microsoft Office, and are slow moving toward new reporting technologies. As a technologist this can be frustrating (see: <a href="http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic" rel="nofollow">http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic</a>), but change is inevitable.
I keep trying to get my dad to get rid of his landline. But he won't, because he sends faxes.<p>"Here," I said, "try this." I showed him HelloFax. That was a no-go, citing privacy concerns. How can he be sure they aren't stealing or saving his personal information? Even if their ToS says so, there's no way to know. And most faxes are for things like insurance, which have SSN's, etc.<p>"But you realize," I said, "that every fax you send nowadays is going to someone's email. Nobody is receiving physical faxes anymore." Sure, he said, but then he is no longer the one responsible.<p>He's savvy enough to read the news and read about awful terms of service changes, privacy breaches, and startups and services going out of business.<p>Plus, he reasons, what if you lose internet?<p>There's no substitute for a physical paper record. (What if the house burns down? Well, he has a scanned copy on his computer too. We could go on forever.)<p>And even if there was a substitute for a physical paper record, it is hard to give peace of mind to my old man about whether hard or soft copies are admissible in court. When <i>are</i> soft copies admissible in court anyway?<p>So unless some service (somehow) is able to give privacy peace of mind to my dad and address all of his issues... it is unlikely I would be able to convince him to move into this century with respect to his personal information, documents, and finances. What startup is solving that?
I've been hearing about the "paperless office" since the mid-80's. What is needed is not something to replace paper, but something better. For example, the paper memo was replaced by email.<p>Paper is just another technology, and a very good one at that.
I went paperless back in 2011[1], never looked back since.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.devotedit.com/2011/11/09/paperless-office/" rel="nofollow">http://www.devotedit.com/2011/11/09/paperless-office/</a>
I wonder if these companies are themselves paperless? While I admire the movement too much business still happens on paper.<p>In our case, we can't go entirely paperless due to the government and lawyers. There are too many things we need to send snail-mail but here's hoping that changes.