The final stage of communicating electronically among institutions requires all institutions to agree on a common standard. The standard which recently was agreed upon is the E-mail standard, x.400. Recently, all US vendors of electronic mail agreed to either switch to the international standard for organizing electronic mail or create an interface so that their clients can effortlessly communicate to anyone. This means that once the national electronic mail directory has been created in the early 1990's, electronic mail will experience explosive growth because regardless of which vendor a customer is using he can communicate with any person listed in the national directory. The gradual emergence of this national electronic mail system will begin displacing the Post Office because electronic mail is currently much cheaper than paper mail and will continue to decrease in relative price. In the next several decades the amount of paperwork on `paper' will drop rapidly.
The E-mail standard X.400, which is now accepted worldwide, provides the carrier for EDI, computer-to-computer exchange of business(or government) documents between organizations in a standard electronic format For example, the automakers are using EDI to save up to $2Ba year by having the computer of the automaker order parts directly from the computer of the supplier. This eliminates all the paperwork. For this move to take place the automobile firms and the suppliers must establish the format for the messages. A similar move is taking place between department stores and their suppliers. Similar progress is taking place in documents for foreign trade. Medical costs in the US could be reduced by as much as $30Bby using EDI to transmit all the medical paperwork among doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, government and individuals. Again this would require the creation of an accepted standard for the communication.
Government usually imitates successful innovations in the private sector. As machines talking to machines, EDI, become commonplace in the private sector, such machine communication will also become commonplace within the government and between the government and political economic agents. The burden of government paperwork will ease as software firms create programs which automatically create government mandated reports and automatically send them to the appropriate government agency via electronic mail. One current example is tax returns to the IRS.