Cox Crow

Form of .... an Automaton

The first step in automating a business process is to reproduce the towers of paper forms in an electronic format like, say, Word or Excel, or Oracle. Because, you know, it's not like we could simplify the process.

Let's go over the steps here.

1. Spend time creating an identical form in Excel
2. e-mail the form to the form-filler
3. form-filler prints out form to see what all the fields are
4. form-filler fills out form and mails it back to wherever
5. wherever prints out form to read it
6. wherever
   1. types in data entered in form, or
   2. copies and pastes data into other form
7. form-filler queries results of form through custom VisualBASIC front-end to a third-party interface to an Oracle database
8. and later, exports it to another Excel spreadsheet because, well, printing from that VB application is not legible

Is this IT as an innovation engine?

8:05:06 PM # Google It!
categories: Layer 8