4. Productivity Increases? What Productivity Increases?

I wish that was the end of it, but it's not.

First, the blind watchmakers who designed the system my friend uses failed to provide any way to organize filled in forms. Some social workers saved their forms on their laptop's desktop. Others saved them with the original forms, occasionally overwriting the originals to their great consternation and confusion. And some just saved the filled forms anywhere they happened to be on the computer at the time.

I put together a set of folders for my friend to save in and, though she struggled a while to find a particular folder with Windows Explorer, she soon got the knack of it all and was able to save her different forms in places where she could find them again. This approach was adopted by at least some of the social workers. Still saving forms takes more time than when the whole process was manual and forms were simply sorted into a filing cabinet, making this another productivity black hole.

Second, one of the key, official forms is double sided. Both sides must be printed front-and-back on the same piece of paper. When my friend first told me about it, I told her she needed a duplex printer, one that could do both sides on a single piece of paper automatically. The designers of what was quickly becoming the IT system from Hell were surprised to hear of this and talked somewhat vaguely about writing a grant for a duplex printer. I worked out a solution for my friend that involved printing page 1 of the form, walking to the printer and physically turning the paper over in the printer's paper tray and then printing the second page of the form.

My friend, who occasionally prints out forms in the office, describes the process she and her coworkers use to assure they don't print on another's page 1 with great humor. It's kind of like a human version of the Nack and Ack stuff that has gone on in computing since the first computers walked the earth. But, human driven Nack and Ack technology isn't all that good, so more than one time my friend wound up with someone's letter printed on the back of one of her documents instead, while the back of the document was printed on another piece of paper. That's another drain on productivity and it wastes paper to boot.

So, now the plot thickens. Instead of spending maybe $3,800 for enough duplex printers like HP's 1320 to print the form in all the agency's offices, someone gets the bright idea to redo the form as a single landscape page in Excel. When I used to work as an IT manager in the business world, we always knew people were in over their heads when they turned to Excel. To fit the form on one page, the powers that be removed most of the space for writing notes and shrunk the thing down when printed to a size where you need a magnifying glass to read it.

Why, oh why didn't they spend a few thousand dollars to buy for enough duplex printers like HP's 1320 for each office?

After they tried the form for a few days the social workers complained so loudly about the lack of space and the preshrinking that the Excel abomination was relegated to the Recycle Bin. But, there is still no solution for the need to print both pages of the form front-and-back on a single piece of paper.

So At Least They're Saving The Data, Right?

"OK," I can hear you saying, "the system may suffer from a lot of design flaws, but at least they're capturing all that data, right?" Nope. Once a form is filled in, it's printed and, in some cases saved and that's it. The printed forms are sent to data entry just like the hand filled forms of the past. The forms are then sent back to the social workers where they are put in filing cabinets just like the old paper forms. All of this is done even though Acrobat and Word forms can be used to capture data into a database for all kinds of later use. And, because there is no database behind the forms, every single field on the form has to be filled in every time; productivity goes up the chimney in smoke yet again.

So that's how my friend's bosses managed to create an 11 pound pencil. I've got to stop now, my blood is boiling. I've worked with a number of smart non-profit agencies designing all kinds of IT systems that work. "Work" in this case means that hardware and software are fitted to the problem at hand and to the actual work that was done before automation. My clients experienced significant positive productivity gains not the negative gains that befell my friend and her coworkers.

Well, at least I can say with confidence that I know who designed this particular piece of crap.