I was looking through the initial results of our new Paper Wars: An Update from the Battlefield report and the following data point caught my eye:
Q. How many of the documents that you scan would you say are “born digital“ (unchanged from printer to scanner)?
A. For 34% of org, half or more of scanned docs are 100% born digital. That means, that on average, 35.6% of scanned docs born digital.
Well, that’s quite a bummer. That basically tells us that after two decades of promoting scanning and capture technology, organizations are basically taking the same information and dealing with it over and over and over again in multiple forms and never really quite rationalizing how to do it properly.
So we basically have digital information in digital systems. We print it out. And then we scan it back in again in order to turn it into a digital asset. And then…wait for it….
I call this next data point the Walking Dead Zombie Paper data point.
Q. How many of the documents that you scan would you say are reprinted from the scanned copy?
A. For 14% of org, half or more of scanned docs are reprinted. That means, that on average, 19.1% of scanned docs reprinted.
So…after we scan paper to turn it into a digital asset (which we had to start with), we then typically print the same scanned image again and start the whole vicious chain all over again. Paper that would not die. Zombie Paper.