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Swimmer963 comments on Research methods - Less Wrong
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My workplace does things in a similar way, scanning in documents by hand without 'interpreting' them in any way. (The result is helpful; you can go on your computer and look at a patient's chart without having to physically go to their hospital campus; but it's also unhelpful in that you can't run a keyword search on anything in the charts, because they're saved as images as opposed to more search-friendly formats.) It looks messy and inefficient to ME that they're keeping both paper and digital records, but I'm sure the immediate cost of making a full transition would be enormous.
Still, I can't imagine that offices in fifty years will still be using this half-and-half method. As technology advances, maybe the transition will get easier; parts of the transition process itself could be automated, with software automatically converting scanned images into searchable text files. Either way, I think the transition has to be made eventually. (But that's a personal opinion.)
Mine too -- a bank.
We've launched a company-wide project to estimate the cost-benefit relationship of scanning all new documents vs. scanning all new + existing documents vs. continuing like now. Perhaps not surprisingly, scanning new documents but not old is the most cost-efficient. This obviously depends on how often one needs to retrieve the documents.
At my company, servers but not scanners exist, and many people already have two monitors.
See my Australian Electoral Commission example. I can assure you that even a basic image scan is far easier to deal with than all the physical paper all the time. Particularly in 2011 rather than 1993.