Digital Signatures and the Paperless Office

Are you ready for the next installment about the paperless office? Yeah, we are too. Here's the link to the article we'll be discussing from TechLeaders 2012, Achieving the Paperless Office: Why Go Paperless? 

This particular article gets us excited because digital signatures are mentioned as a critical tool to go paperless! We hear over and over again about companies getting held up in processes because they need a "wet" signature from a customer. Many companies have been held up in the past because of the lack of secure technology, but that is true no longer. In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the ESIGN Act providing clear legal validity to digital signatures. In the article, the author mentions users' initial reluctance to accept electronic signature technology, but we have seen that changing the longer we've been around with adoption accelerating incredibly fast within the last year. Most people want things done immediately, and digital signatures help achieve that. Not to mention, they eliminate the need for paper.

The article states, "Electronic signatures are possible to use directly with electronic documents in multiple forms including signatures that resemble physical signatures, encrypted keys that represent a specific person and trust authorities who host public key infrastructures (PKI). It’s not important to understand all the different signature technologies, rather, it is more important to understand that signatures can be obtained electronically and the paper form can be eliminated altogether. Digital signatures were the last legal hurdle to going paperless and that obstacle was overcome in the year 2000."

One giant step toward a paperless office was taken in 2000!  However, now more and more leading companies are no longer walking but sprinting toward efficient, paperless processes with secure execution of documents online with trusted digital signatures.

In our next blog post we'll touch on the savings associated with using digital signatures to go paperless. You won't want to miss it!

If you missed our last blog posts, you can check them out here:

• The Desire for a Paperless Office Part 1
• The Desire for a Paperless Office Part 2
• "How To" Ideas for Achieving the Paperless Office