In a study published recently by Toplevel Computing at least 70% of companies surveyed said that they still maintained their records on entirely paper-based systems.

Toplevel has a point to prove - it does create and publish online recording forms - but with the rapid spread of electronic communications and intranets it does seem that may companies and organisations have failed to grasp the signficant savings that could be made in both data collection and data maintenance by transferring mundane record keeping into an online format. Not only can such records be stored, sifted and analysed automatically, but the results can also be made available immediately to any manager who requires access, subject only to appropriate security being in place to comply with privacy and data protection requirments.

The study revealed that many IT companies were included in the group who still maintained paper-based systems alongside electronic ones in their effort to 'spread the risk' - hardly a ringing endorsement of the services they are seeking to promote! The dawn of the genuine paperless office still seems some distance away.