5 Reasons To Consider Using Digital Pen and Paper To Boost Productivity

(Before It's News)

Earlier this year I reviewed Anoto’s digital pen and paper technology, it’s time to revisit that issue.

Paper is good – I’m not one of these techno beasts who put down business professionals who rely on paper. Often times, paper is just a better medium for reading and editing information.

The benefits of a digital pen and paper is that you get the best of both worlds. The digital pen means your back office can have accurate information, more easily capture into your computer systems and you have an automatic archive of what is being written. These benefits alone make it worth seriously looking into.

Joshua Greenbaum, is principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting and gives these five reasons why digital pen and paper technology might be best for your business:

• User-Friendly. It is as easy to use as a regular pen and paper. Just replace the existing pen with a digital pen and familiar handwritten documents and forms can become part of a permanent, fully-digitized, record.
• Collaborative. There are many instances where digital pen and paper technology is ideal. For example, a group of architects marking up a blueprint at a construction site, or a doctor taking a medical history without having a PC or tablet that might normally get in the way of the patient/doctor interaction.
• Rugged. Many business processes require capturing information under less-than-ideal circumstances where a PC or tablet may not be the best solution. This may be in challenging environments, where extremes of heat and cold require gloves and other equipment that impede the use of keyboard and touch screens, but where a digital pen solution works very well.
• Keeps Users “on Task.” The use of digital pen and paper technology places an intrinsic limit on what a user can do in the course of completing a specific task. A general purpose device such as a PC, tablet or phone, provides a potentially large number of distractions and diversions for users, who may be tempted to use the device for a purpose unrelated to the specific task or process at hand. The close link between the user and the digital pen means the only interaction a user can have with the device is dictated by what is on the piece of paper.
• Easy to Integrate With Existing Business Processes. The ability of digital pen and paper technology to capture the pen strokes of a user and digitize them lends itself readily to the use of this technology inside an existing business process that is already dependent on the use of a paper-based form. Therefore, digital pen and paper technology can be used for pre-existing workflows and business processes, and can be integrated into the development of new business processes.

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Ramon Ray, Editor & Technology Evangelist, Smallbiztechnology.com
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