PAPER VERSUS SOFT COPIES

     The school as an educational institution is going more technical than reflective. Things likes administrative and managerial procedures have become more tedious and rigid. What advantage has it over simpler and more practical kind of running the institution? Well, they are for you and I to find out.
          The school has experienced waves of changes since the establishment of Ministry of Education. There have been so many changes in technical aspects like infra-structure and human resource to run the school. Each school now is going towards IT-based management but ironically, we could still find hardcopies or scripts being used wantonly! For instance, a school spends about USD 3,910.00 (RM 17,00.00) annually or almost 5 reams a day on paper alone! Other expenses include printing and maintenance, all amounting half the amount spent on paper; that is almost RM30,000. Should the school choose to run on less paper documentation or hardcopies, a huge amount of money could be saved.
          Then, what are the alternatives? Great souls, we have been using Google cloud, Google drive or blogs, haven't we? Cyber infra-structure is the premise where the arrival or departure of documents could be a Beep! Beep! on e-mail, sms or the all-star what's application! Try those apps and you will save thousands of ringgit. On top of that, by exploiting the softcopies or files, one can safe-keep and reuse them whenever needed. Documents sent through e-mails could be exploited or edited for other uses against hardcopies which will end their role in the files secured in the documentation room waiting for calls. Finally, the stacks of printed matter will be salvaged by recycling centres at a much lower rate; 25 to 30 sen per kilogram. Comparatively, the cost of a ream of paper which is around 2 kilograms is about RM9.00, and that's about 15 times less than the cost! What a waste!
          Paper documentation as we are doing in schools is wasteful; time and money wise. The piles of document are outcomes of annual school activities which we know will be useless the following year. We are actually creating a big problem on space(to store this document before disposal) and money(spent to purchase the paper). The physical size of the files need space. So, we have to establish rooms to house these files; luckily they are reusable the following year until they are tattered. 
          The most frustrating thing is these hardcopies are only referred to during auditing by appointed auditors or else they will be just items for exhibits. The teachers will always refer these files from their laptops projected on LCD for discussion; believe me that the files will not be taken in during meetings, they will be arcades before even the year ends.