“Engineers change jobs, and get new assignments, just as everyone else does,” David C. Kennedy, P.E., an electronics engineer there, said recently. “When an engineer leaves, nobody knows what was kept in his personal files. Office file space is limited, both for classified and non-classified material. Decisions have to be made, on what to keep and what to discard.

“Sometimes it is just impossible to recover all the data obtained in a test or study done in years past. We have to do it over. And a fully-instrumented flight test can cost about a quarter-million dollars.”

That’s the way things used to be at Redstone, until Mr. Kennedy came up with the idea for a CD-ROM database system four years ago. “I thought it was wasteful for us not to capture data and retain it,” he said.

The system, as he envisioned it, had to include high-speed color scanning, filing and encryption of classified documents. This had never before been done in a one-operator, one-operation PC controlled desktop system.

Several years went by in software tests. They tried and rejected various systems, before they settled on Laserfiche Document Imaging. Now, test data, reports, studies, engineering notes, briefing minutes-everything that documents the activity of the office-is run through a scanner, at about one second per page. The software burns the incoming data into a compact disk, available for later retrieval by anyone-with the proper decryption key-who types in a word or phrase from the original document. A few more keyboard taps, and it is printed out on paper-an exact duplicate of the original.

Most important, the system also protects classified data, with National Security Agency encryption hardware. Processed through the NSA encryptor, the data is burned into the CD as unclassified material. The disk can then be stored, unguarded, in a box near a work station. If an unauthorized person were to try to run it on a computer, all he/she would see would be gibberish. The NSA encryptor/decryptor key, needed to make sense of it, is locked away in a safe.

All over North America, military engineers and the civilian contractors that serve them are dealing with a paper avalanche. Many factors contribute to this, in addition to the growing sophistication of military research and development: growing public awareness of environmental problems, the federal budget pinch, the increasingly litigious atmosphere of our times, to name a few. More and still more records must be kept, in greater detail than ever before; and they must be clear, accurate and instantly accessible. A whole new concept has developed to answer this need-the paperless office.

At the Army Chemical Warfare Service installation at Aberdeen, Proving Ground, in Maryland the need for cataloguing hazardous chemicals-and instructions how to treat anyone exposed to them in an emergency-created a record-keeping problem. At the John J. McMullen Associates, Inc. naval shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi and Bath, Maine, the need was for safe storage and quick, easy retrieval and distribution of specifications and change orders: all this to coordinate the efforts of the the teams building a new fleet of DDG-51 guided-missile destroyers . At Scott Air Force Base, near the southern tip of Illinois, the problem was storage and retrieval of administrative records: vouchers for jet engine fuel and other supplies; purchase orders; timesheets for contractor personnel, and policy directives from the Pentagon.

To solve these and other problems, military information managers have turned to the paperless office, combining document scanning, digital storage on inexpensive, high capacity media like the CD-ROM disk, and LAN/WAN, local- and wide-area networking to link two or many desktop computers, in the same office or thousands of miles apart.

In all these applications, the objectives are basically the same: (1) to save office space that otherwise would be occupied by a steady proliferation of file cabinets (2) to preserve records against accidental loss, damage or atmospheric deterioration caused by sunlight, heat or dry air and (3) to conserve staff time spent searching archives-frequently hours or days.

Laserfiche pioneered the concept of imaging and electronic retrieval in 1982, but several years were to pass before the development of inexpensive high-capacity storage hardware made the Laserfiche concept economically feasible. The standard system is designed for standard-sized office stationery–8 x 11 -inch business letters or 8 x14-inch or longer legal documents. But with extra-large engineering scanners and printers, the system can handle anything up to a 4 x5-foot schematic drawing.

In many locations, especially government offices, space saving is the most important benefit of the paperless office. More than 80 federal, state, county and municipal agencies now use Laserfiche. The Fresno school district -second largest in California -condensed an estimated 1.5 million pages of employee records into the system and what had filled 75 four-drawer filing cabinets became a two-foot shelf of CD’s.

One of the largest engineering firms in North America has found a unique application for the technology. OAO Corporation, of Greenbelt, MD, an aerospace-oriented firm with locations across the United States and in Canada, uses it to store job-applicant resumes. Then, if the company suddenly needs someone with special qualifications -say, an engineer who (1) has experience in certain kinds of computer programming , (2) lives near Colorado Springs, (3) has a top secret security clearance and (4) speaks fluent French -candidates pop out of the computer’s data bank with a few key strokes.

The company started with a stand-alone system in the summer of 1994, and a year later had five stations linked by a wide area network, , enabling personnel managers in various parts of the continent to read the data simultaneously. More than 1,000 resumes are now on file in the system.

In all these applications and many more, those involved in engineering and construction enterprises are discovering that the problem is paper, and that document imaging is the solution. As one manager at McMullen Shipyard told me: “There’s only one problem left, and it’s the same thing that occurs whenever there’s a basic change in management techniques. What do you do with the fellow who can’t believe he’s working if he doesn’t have a piece of paper in his hand? We’re just chipping away at that.”