Document Imaging Has Been Around For Years But Paper Still Survives. Why?

By Kevin Ells via the Axis Technical Blog

In a Time of All-Things-Digital and the Age of the Internet, Paper Still Survives. Why?

Why? Well for one it’s low-tech, theoretically easy to use, and everyone is comfortable using paper. Maybe it has to do with a sense of trust—people like the feel of paper and holding something tangible makes it real. In an age of Internet fraud and cyber security hacks, paper somehow seems safer. So we keep using it. In fact, paper usage has increased in some areas of business, and the Mortgage and Title industry is no exception. Just look at a loan packet. Paper is comfortable, but it has its challenges, more than you may realize.

Paper Processing is Slow 

First of all, it can be slow. It is time-consuming to collaborate on a document—say a contract, for example—with several people if everything you want to make revisions to requires printing a new copy each time and manually sending it around for comments and changes. That is why folks use email to send around a file for review.

Unfortunately, with this process, now you have countless copies of the document and nobody is sure who has the latest and greatest version. Communication gets lost, security breaks down and this process is not effective. If you are working with an organization that has multiple locations, access to paper documents can run at the speed of the mail service, or at best a fax machine. This does not actually work when sharing oversized documents that can run into the hundreds of pages and even different-sized layouts like letter and legal.

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