In the MacMillan Building on the Main Mall at UBC, you’ll find one of the few Paperless Offices on campus. The Assistant Dean, Academic at the Faculty of Land & Food Systems – Lynn Newman-Saunders– sits behind a bare desk, except for a computer and keyboard. She credits a new development in the university’s Student Information System for making it all possible…

How did your Paperless Office come about? Was there a ‘Eureka’ moment when you realized you could do it?

No, it started off in dribs and drabs. First we started using recycled paper and went on from there. A number of things just seemed to click into place. Combined with Degree Navigator, a purchased software program than enables us to track our students’ degree progress electronically, Student Systems in Enrolment Services has been developing functions on the Student Information System that enable advisors to track students in new ways. Then last year, they rolled out the final piece of the picture, called “Communications Tracking” — so that all emails, phone calls, and appointments can now be tracked through the computer. Before, students would fill out a form and we’d make our notes, and then file it away. Now everything’s done through the system, and the need for a paper trail is reduced. That’s when we said “You know what? We can work towards ‘paperless advising’ in this office.”

It’s all relatively new. This is the first year we haven’t created new files for every single student that’s coming in. The only thing now that we actually file is confidential information. So for example, if we had a medical report or something of a sensitive nature, we would make a digital notation: “See hard file”.

How do you keep track of developments on each file?

We manually type information directly into the student’s electronic file – it’s that simple. The beauty of the Student Information System is that information can be added or accessed regardless of where the computer is located. For example, Joshua Robertson in our office might be speaking to a student on the telephone in his office here on campus, and he can electronically access what I put onto the file from my computer at home. The improvements to the system have provided many of us the option to work in a variety of new ways - it’s incredibly liberating.

The changes are a solid enhancement to the entire university’s advising practices. A student may transfer to a different faculty, and their file is available to his or her next advisor; it’s important to have the whole history when dealing with a complex situation should one arise. Hard copy files aren’t transferred from one faculty to the next.

How do you define a ‘paperless office’? What does it mean to your team?

We’re not generating any paper in our routine advising practices. Perhaps “paperless” is a bit of a misnomer because I don’t think we’ll ever entirely get away from using it as there will always be times when a situation warrants a hard copy letter. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I still feel that a letter is more dignified and personal than an email. When you really stop and think about what merits printing and what doesn’t, it’s amazing how much consumption can be reduced. It’s a habit that one gets into…does anyone these days really have to think twice about sorting their trash into recyclables?

The converse of that is that electronic communications tend to be impersonal. Isn’t that something a paperless office has to grapple with?

Yes, I believe that’s true, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle. We have taken a conscious effort to tackle this head-on and ensure that the technology allows us to direct our efforts in the ways we want rather than the other way around - we don’t allow the technology to intimidate us. Reliance on paper is time consuming, not to mention expensive…think about how many resources are unnecessarily burned up having someone stand at a file cabinet all day. It’s an unfulfilling task that is so easily avoided. By moving away from paper, we have more time to focus on interacting with our students. We want our students to become involved in the faculty, and to do so we have to be able to engage them.

What about emails? Are you running off copies just to handle them and have a record of what was said?

Printing emails would be illogical because there is no need to do so – we can respond and then copy the entire dialogue to the student’s electronic file.

But your computer could crash…

It could also be backed up, and we do that regularly. We’ve recovered data from our back-up server before. The electronic student files reside on IT Services’ servers, and they’re backed up nightly, weekly, monthly, yearly…and a log is kept so really, there isn’t a cause for concern.

It also helps that there are only three of us in this office, so we tend to handle a lot of things person to person. That certainly helps to reduce the paper burden. I do send emails to other advisors, but because we’re such a small faculty, it’s easy to wander over to a colleague’s office whenever I want to have a face-to-face discussion and then record the decision electronically.

You might agree, then, that the size of your team allows you to go paperless more easily?

I think this system is adaptable to any size of organization. It’s not just a matter of size, it’s a matter of attitude towards change and innovation. I feel the challenge is firstly to get people to buy in, to trust the system. I have more faith that a computer isn’t going to crash than I do about a piece of paper not going missing.

LFS provides a lot of value to the larger university community in that we are large enough that we are a valid sample size, and yet small enough that if something should require tweaking, any adverse impact that may result is easily contained. I love working here because it’s an entire community of people who take a constructive and positive approach to new things; instead of dwelling on the negative, we try to figure out solutions.

Stats Canada says that offices are using twice as much paper as they did twenty years ago. So you really are the exception.

I believe that statistic. It might be a generational thing. Our Learning Centre hosts a Brown Bag Lunch series of various speakers on a variety of topics. A couple of weeks ago we had Chris Johnson in discussing the role of technology in teaching. Chris was saying you could tell the differences in age groups when you watch what they do with an email. If they’re over a certain age, they have to print it out to read it.

What do you see as the next step in your paperless office?

I don’t really think about it all that much any more, it’s just a practice we have incorporated and we’ve moved on to the next project. Now we’re working with the staff in our Learning Centre to learn more about emerging new technologies that will help us build on our engagement practices with our students; they’re an amazingly imaginative and skilled group who have an ability to look at new technology and think about how it can work for us. We’re looking at Facebook, Second Life and other emerging “social” spaces on the web. It’s actually a lot of fun trying to find innovative ways to translate our faculty’s enthusiasm for community using internet and communication technologies. And believe me, this is a fun place to work!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Q & A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Email this article to someone you know.