Paperless Office

[andysocial]

So, working for DISA, the information systems folks for the military, we send many documents around for review to various bosses (I've got 8 bosses, Bob - Office Space).

These documents are 40 pages and longer, and we print them out single-sided and hustle them around via sneakernet throught this 5-acre compound. After we print a couple copies for different folks to review, we make more copies of the changes and then of the changes to the revisions to the updates ad nauseum.

Why aren't we sending this by email? Because "it's easier to mark it up on paper" they say. And these are the IS masters for DOD? Hi, I'm a revision mark and comment in Word...

Comments

[somabrak.livejournal.com]

That sounds a lot like what I used to do at my old job. I worked in the marketing department of a telecommunications company, and about a million people had to approve of every little change we made to ads.

Unfortunately, everyone insisted on printing out the ads time and time again, making the changes on paper, and then passing them around, faxing, etc. Finally, after months of trying to convince them to do it a different way, we started sending PDF's of the ever-changing ads through email.

[andysocial]

Way back in the days before ubiquitous computing (all of 10 years ago), we used much less paper than we do today, in the age of effortless electronic communications.

When I was a young lad in the Army, if a memo had a simple typo on it, it was good enough. If an award was due someone, it was done in pen on a form. By the time I made good my military escape, everything had to be perfectly laserprinted. If there was a typo as simple as an extra space in the middle of a sentence, print it again. And, on those occasions when someone attempted to use the "package and email" function of Formflow (lots of military use), they eventually gave up in frustration. The other people they had to exchange data with were morons incapable of following the English instructions in the program.

I love the fact that we have routing slips and carbon paper, yet we've gotten rid of the distribution clerk. So, we have contractors and GS civilians wandering the halls with 50-page documents, acting as exceptionally overpaid grunt labor.

Sometimes I feel like the movie Brazil is happening right here in Arizona...

[nephesh.livejournal.com]

greely hall, right? i hate that fucking place.

[andysocial]

JITC, actually. All the same bureaucracy, though.

[nephesh.livejournal.com]

yikes. yeah, it's all the same... i used to work in the ansoc on the helldesk (helpdesk) under fc business systems. do you know of some guy named wayne seth, by any chance? he was the project manager, and he did such a rotten job with the helpdesk, he ended up getting shitcanned.

Wayne Seth

[andysocial]

Doesn't sound familiar, sorry.