It’s not just me with these kinds of experiences! Robert Baguma, a member of i-network, an emailing list for ICT professionals and enthusiast in Uganda had the similar resentments when NITA(National Information Technology Authority) required hard copies for a job application; The benefits of “less paper in the office” are tremendous and they include among others; unnecessary stationery expenses, reduced space for file cabinets, shelves, paper, secure and safe environment for content to be stored, leveraged and reused and reduced human errors in manual records keeping and hence loss of data. But why are organizations and businesses still so obsessed with paper? To answer this question, i headed over to the African Chief Executive Officer Business network on Linkedin where Eng. Charles Muhigirwa who’s a Managing Director at Damude Technical Services Ltd thinks that there’s not much usage of ICT applications in the organisations and that literacy is still low in Africa compared to other continents. But J. Mwabeze from i-network thinks that its our outdated laws that are still clinging us to the old ways rather than propelling us to the new efficient future; Eng. Charles yet again concurs; There’s no denying that too much paper can be both messy and costly! Yet most organisations are not anywhere close to getting rid of even 10% of the office “paper clutter” despite the availability of applications and tools that make document or content management a breeze. It turns out if the systems in place do not have policies that are friendly to new forms of document signing, approvals or whatever, it seems to me that the “paperless office of the future” is still, a very remote reality on the African continent.
