You are a person who needs to sign a document. This might be a recurring part of your job or something you do every once and a while. Either way, you keep a fax machine around for this very purpose. I call it the Fax Dance. This stone age ritual starts with a simple email containing the document that needs your signature. You print that document and start the waiting period. Hopefully you have enough toner and paper in the printer because if you don’t, the whole process is over and you can’t sign your document. If you did have enough toner and paper, chances are good that you printed the whole document. All 100 pages of it. I mean, how do you know exactly which pages need your signature? Can you print pages 1, 4, and 98 easily? Even the first step of the fax dance is complicated and painful. And let’s not forget that you just wasted part of a tree in order to sign a simple document. You know you are going to throw that thing away as soon as you are done faxing it.
Okay, so you’ve printed and signed the document, now you get to use the fax machine. Feed all of your document into the fax machine, enter the phone number of your recipient and pray that the line isn’t busy. Now you wait. If the line is busy, your fax machine might retry, or it might not. Either way, you need to keep tabs on it. If the fax machine connects correctly, beware of paper jams and or disconnects. These are all real problems with using a device invented before the Internet. If your document went through correctly, then the fax dance is over. Now your recipient can read the blurry contract you just sent to him. Hopefully there are no mistakes because going through the fax dance again is very unpleasant.
Okay, there are some other major concerns with using the fax machine beyond just painful process of sending one. For example, let us say that the fax machine is a shared device in an office. Talk about privacy concerns. Anyone in the office can walk buy and pick up your faxed document. Usually a signed document is something very important and very private. I wouldn’t trust a fax machine, so why should you?
So why do we continue to do the fax dance? We have this wonderful technology that allows improvement in our work-flows and lifestyles and yet we still use this archaic machine to do something that is arguably the most important part of our job. How many documents have you signed that aren’t important? There are several reasons why we still use a fax machines today. Signature capture technology is expensive and difficult to use. Most solutions that we see in our daily lives such as the tablet our UPS driver uses or the pad at the grocery store checkout line are all proprietary hardware devices that cost quite a bit. Some companies have tried to innovate and make your laptop track pad into a signature device, but that has failed to reach consumers because it is bulky and the space is rather limited. Devices that work with a pen such as the Tablet PC are way too expensive for consumers especially when all they need is the signature portion and not the rest of the computer.
With the introduction of low cost multi-touch devices like the iPhone, signature solutions are now affordable. The fax dance is dead and so is your fax machine. It is time to rejoice.