The Office of the Future

An in-depth analysis of how word processing will reshape the corporate office

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the June 30, 1975, issue of BusinessWeek.

The office is the last corporate holdout to the automation tide that has swept through the factory and the accounting department. It has changed little since the invention of the typewriter 100 years ago. But in almost a matter of months, office automation has emerged as a full-blown systems approach that will revolutionize how offices work.

At least this is the gospel being preached by office equipment makers and the research community. And because the labor-intensive office desperately needs the help of technology, nearly every company with large offices is trying to determine how this onrushing wave of new hardware and procedures can help to improve its office productivity.

Will the office change all that much? Listen to George E. Pake, who heads Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto (Calif.) Research Center, a new think tank already having a significant impact on the copier giant's strategies for going after the office systems market: "There is absolutely no question that there will be a revolution in the office over the next 20 years. What we are doing will change the office like the jet plane revolutionized travel and the way that TV has altered family life."

Pake says that in 1995 his office will be completely different; there will be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. "I'll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button," he says. "I can get my mail or any messages. I don't know how much hard copy [printed paper] I'll want in this world."

The Paperless Office

Some believe that the paperless office is not that far off. Vincent E. Giuliano of Arthur D. Little, Inc., figures that the use of paper in business for records and correspondence should be declining by 1980, "and by 1990, most record-handling will be electronic."

But there seem to be just as many industry experts who feel that the office of the future is not around the corner. "It will be a long time—it always takes longer than we expect to change the way people customarily do their business," says Evelyn Berezin, president of Redactron Corp., which has the second-largest installed base (after International Business Machines Corp.) of text-editing typewriters. "The EDP [data-processing] industry in the 1950s thought that the whole world would have made the transition to computers by 1960. And it hasn't happened yet."

But everyone agrees that office systems are coming. So the real question is: How does American business get to George Pake's office of the future when many companies still are having real trouble changing their offices to accommodate the first generation of standalone editing typewriters?

Getting there means finding the answers to a host of very complex questions. Can desk-top terminals be made "friendly" enough so that executives will use them? Should a lot of powerful machines be moved together with central libraries and thus break up traditional working relationships? Will office systems get needed computer power by depending on the machines already in EDP centers doing accounting and financial work? Says Pake's boss, Jack E. Goldman, Xerox chief scientist: "I don't think anyone can really know which is the way to go now."

If the office of the future is a collection of these electronic terminals linked to each other and to electronic filing cabinets, "it will change our daily life," Pake says. "And this could be kind of scary." This is what most concerns Pake and a growing number of other researchers and users. "We have just really discovered the enormity of the problem," Pake admits. "How well we succeed," he says, "depends on how well we understand the human interface and the thought process as they go through the daily work process."

To most planners, the task is even bigger than it was in the early days of the computer revolution. "This is a tougher job of planning than data processing," says Robert B. LaDue, IBM's marketing director for word processing systems. EDP initially zeroed in on accounting applications, he says, and it did not have the broad effect on people that word processing, which reaches everyone, will have.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.