4 ms·

> Instead, this should be done department-by-department, app-by-app. Design the process from the bottom up." Sounds great. If you can do this in less than a we

> Instead, this should be done department-by-department, app-by-app. Design the process from the bottom up." Sounds great. If you can do this in less than a week for each form (the author managed 100 forms in 2 years) then you're perfecting processes _and_ moving them online faster than the author. But just in case you missed it, let me quote a couple of bits of the article: "Getting city workers to accept online submissions rather than traditional paper ones is the bulk of this work. On average, it took me about 30 minutes to make a digital form and five weeks to meet with, earn the trust of, and get buy-in from the employees who would use it. Even if they were excited, the nitty gritty details took a lot of back and forth." "Some departments had sort-of insane business processes for submissions. If I tried to change those, I would spend a whole year on a single department. By focusing on the priority, moving forms online and making it easier for the customer, I could make consistent progress rather than be consistently blocked." My guess is that you're going to spend decades perfecting processes, only to find the world has changed (or the politicians in control of the City of Boston have changed the law that governs the processes!) by the time you're ready to begin digitize forms. You're letting perfect be the enemy of good. > You should never just move things online. The web is different, and enables different business processes. Change the process first. Forms come later. Sometimes "just moving things online" is a big improvement over the status quo. But the author agrees with you in at least one case. See the paragraph about what they are doing about death certificate requests.

fluidcruft 6y ago
Yeah, I agree. A lot of what I deal with at my job is similar. The people doing the work just don't want people coming in telling them new ways to do things. It doesn't help that vendors are constantly promising the sky and leaving them with broken things. But once you start showing them small incremental improvements they start to discover the next step etc. Then they see how machines can help them and make suggestions. In my field there's a very well-known example of a MRI manufacturer who has made very "smart" systems that end-users simply refuse to use. Technologists know how to operate a scanner, when a machine starts trying to help them it's very difficult for them to (1) understand what the machine is doing and how to work with it and (2) trust the machine, primarily because physicians yell at people, not machines. There are maybe 10-20% of the technologists that "get it" and want to tinker and learn how to use the new features. The rest still miss the way scanners worked 20 years ago--because they understood and trust them. That's the thing with paper forms--people can understand what's happening, discover the process and figure out how to succeed and not to be yelled at. When it disappears into a machine it might as well be a blind and deaf new hire who keeps messing with your desk. It's a major issue of trust. So the parent's "no it needs to be this giant reinvention when strangers who don't do the work come in and tell you that you need to do everything differently" attitude maybe works with management. I honestly think the big problem here is that we don't seem to have systems that people can play with to build their own ideas anymore. Maybe sharepoint but my god I can't even figure out how to do anything on that. It really boggles my mind that we have things like iPads and iPhones but nothing like Hypercard.

fluidcruft 6y ago

Yeah, I agree. A lot of what I deal with at my job is similar. The people doing the work just don't want people coming in telling them new ways to do things. It doesn't help that vendors are constantly promising the sky and leaving them with broken things. But once you start showing them small incremental improvements they start to discover the next step etc. Then they see how machines can help them and make suggestions. In my field there's a very well-known example of a MRI manufacturer who has made very "smart" systems that end-users simply refuse to use. Technologists know how to operate a scanner, when a machine starts trying to help them it's very difficult for them to (1) understand what the machine is doing and how to work with it and (2) trust the machine, primarily because physicians yell at people, not machines. There are maybe 10-20% of the technologists that "get it" and want to tinker and learn how to use the new features. The rest still miss the way scanners worked 20 years ago--because they understood and trust them. That's the thing with paper forms--people can understand what's happening, discover the process and figure out how to succeed and not to be yelled at. When it disappears into a machine it might as well be a blind and deaf new hire who keeps messing with your desk. It's a major issue of trust. So the parent's "no it needs to be this giant reinvention when strangers who don't do the work come in and tell you that you need to do everything differently" attitude maybe works with management. I honestly think the big problem here is that we don't seem to have systems that people can play with to build their own ideas anymore. Maybe sharepoint but my god I can't even figure out how to do anything on that. It really boggles my mind that we have things like iPads and iPhones but nothing like Hypercard.