It bugs me when people equate "scanning" with "paperless." Though you can get rid of the physical paper, and the associated storage challenges, it does very little to improve on some of the organizational challenges paper presents.

Ignoring OCR (which is still a shaky thing), a scanned image of a document is just that: an image. A computer cannot distinguish between it and a LOLCat. I can put the images in folders and attach them to e-mails, but if I want to search for every document associated with, say "bicycles," I would have to go into relevant folders manually.

For something like "bicycles," I would likely have two or three places to look, but if the search term is broader, it might be more difficult. Doing any sort of cross-references search is even more challenging.

If, instead of a picture, it were a machine-readable document (a text file, for instance), I could do these searches. The text could also be easily incorporated into other documents. Storage space would often be less as well.

Scanners may be great for sucking in handwritten notes (though the previously mentioned advantages may make it worth the effort to transcribe them). Some would argue that it is the only way to get a signed document into a computer-based system. I would ask, why haven't we found a better way than pen to paper to authenticate a document. Nicholas Negroponte suggested, fourteen years ago, that the fax machine retarded these efforts. The scanner is merely a continuation of this trend.

Overall, though, I believe that a paperless office is about as useful as a paperless bathroom. You will never be able to totally eliminate it.