A quarter of enterprise paper documents are misplaced, and will never be located, according to the Datapro and Gartner Group. On that note, the Wall Street Journal has found that the average business worker in America loses approximately an hour and a half a day, which amounts to 40 hours a year, in lost productivity, which includes looking for lost and misplaced items from messy desks and files.

It is estimated that knowledge workers spend roughly 15 to 30 percent of their time at work searching for information. In those cases, a digital filing system would come in quite handy. Digital filing systems, combined with business card scanners and business card readers, can help optimize the efficiency of companies. After all, going digital is the wave of the future, and many companies have shown they care about the environment with the implementation of digital filing systems.

One of the major things a business needs to go digital is portable scanners or laptop scanners. Every time a business works with a paper document, they should scan it so it goes on file. That way, if anyone needs that particular document again, all they have to do is search for it on the computer instead of having to physically search for it. In the next five years, the analyst firm Gartner expects that over 60 percent of server workloads will be virtualized.

The average enterprise that employs 1,000 knowledge workers actually wasted between $6 million and $12 million a year looking for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or trying to recreate information that cannot be found, according to an International Data Corporation study. For example, if a business is looking for a business card to do work with someone and cannot find it, a business card reader would be the perfect solution.

Overall, it is highly suggested that businesses go digital whenever possible. Sometimes, businesses still like to do work on paper, but for the most part, keeping your files on a computer is smart, at very least for backup, and ultimately to optimize organization and efficiency.