Information just-in-time: An approach to the paperless office

Abstract

Information Just-in-Time or iJIT is a concept that denotes the idealistic state where information is always ready for use when it is necessary. Despite of the great success of search engines for the Internet, we still have problems in dealing with information just around us. We still have a lot of paper documents on the desk, in the cabinets and drawers. The reasons are well described by A. Sellen in his book on "the myth of the paperless office." By borrowing the concept of hot/warm/cold documents from the book, we will introduce a system that allows users to work on 'hot' paper documents, keeping the writings in computer simultaneously. The system, called iJIT system, uses the Anoto's digital pen technology with on-demand printing capability to capture history of usage of documents and annotations. Electronically produced documents can be printed with the Anoto dots, and handwriting made on the papers by a digital pen is digitized and stored in computer. The digitized writing information also holds encrypted date, time, and pen ID information, by which we can identify who wrote what and when in a secured way. Because the equivalent information is kept in computer, such paper documents may be discarded any time. A prototype system being used by about 200 people at our laboratory will be described. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.