Well-written article, useful insights, total misunderstanding of the way things like this should be done.
There's an old saying: don't pave cow paths. That's exactly what he was doing. He was putting a different front end on an existing process. You end up with a total nightmare.
Instead, this should be done department-by-department, app-by-app. Design the process from the bottom up. For example: a form to request some document. Start with the documents: how are they stored? Should they be stored differently? Are they in a database? Should we really even be storing documents, or should they just be database entries? For that matter, should the department that manages them even exist? (Here in Chicago, the answer was no. They merged the County Recorder of Deeds office with the County Clerk.)
You should never just move things online. The web is different, and enables different business processes. Change the process first. Forms come later.
You're not technically wrong, but what you are suggesting simply doesn't work in government. Each department is a kingdom with varying amounts of political clout. Only the smallest and least-powerful groups will jump on board with a mandate that induces invasive and drastic changes to their workflows. The kingdoms with more political clout will laugh in your face and slow your progress down until your project simply runs out of clock time. The result is that you still have all the same legacy workflows and also this new workflow for the small number of groups you had more power over.
This guy managed to achieve his mandate AND managed to entice groups to investigate updating their workflows after the fact. I agree it's not the way things SHOULD work, but he managed to find a way to make the most amount of progress and along the way some kingdoms were enticed to cycle back around and improve their workflows too.
What you are proposing most of the time will not because it would require an immense, truly Herculean, amount of political will and backing.
Redesigning processes clashes with the #1 rule of big systems: processes are ruled by people whose jobs depend on them. And they WILL fight tooth and nail to keep those jobs. The bigger the change, the more threatened they will feel, the more they will sabotage you.
And you know what the #2 rule of big systems is: no matter what "the boss" may say, if the officials are not on board it's just not going to happen.
If you have not, I suggest watching "Yes minister" :).
The author was given the mandate to "move forms online", so they chose the quickest, most agile option and did just that - moved forms online.
The author later brings up the questions you mentioned - what is a form, should these forms exist, etc, but instead of spending a long time trying to design an entire new system _when that wasn't even asked of them_ they decided to deliver results. Once they gained trust and got buy-in by the city, they could think bigger.
> 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.
This approach is likely to produce better experiences if it could be seen through to the end, but also likely to go nowhere inside a large organization.
Change is hard. Radical change, all at once inside a big organization is near impossible.
In this case, it’s a great first step to get all this info out of paper and wooden inboxes and into a more accessible form.
Doing so still leaves open the potential for reinventing high-priority forms and workflows. It also makes it easier, because now the team can easily ask questions like, “how many people use this?” And “how much time do we spend on this?” Etc.
In short, while you might be right wrt. producing innovation, sometimes the first step is to just put it on the internet.
This is 100% correct. I run a govtech startup (similar to Seamless docs, the company mentioned in the article), and this was one of the key insights we've picked up over the last couple years.
When your process happens on paper, there's nothing forcing you to ensure it makes logical sense. You can draw whatever you want on a piece of paper, so a lot of the paper forms that people call "permits" are just messy reflections of the thought process of the person who originally conceived the process. Naturally, products that start by directly replicating a paper form are accommodating and perpetuating the lack of planning.
We've kind of taken a backwards approach where we don't accommodate direct translation of forms and instead provide tools that encourage people to think through the steps of their permitting processes to get them to make sense on a digital platform. More often than not, they discover glaring inefficiencies in the process which when fixed make everything work more smoothly even independent of the move to a digital platform.
I will disagree. In the distant past, we had a bunch of forms to move online and our platform was SharePoint. I know, I know, but before you blame SharePoint, we didn't get to the point of SharePoint being the issue.
Instead, we got endless bikeshedding about "the process" and during that, many unrealistic expectations were conjured into existence as each process was re-imagined into kind of ultimate, abstract form of near infinite configurability. Try to imagine sitting at a table as someone says, with complete seriousness, that people ought to be able to submit a multiple one terabyte (not mega or giga, tera) files with a particular webform. Not any other transfer protocol, either. And this is back around 2008 or so. It should just ... expand as necessary.
Nor was this the only time I encountered this kind of behavior. I have seen functionaries whose visions of process suddenly bloat like that "elephant's toothpaste" when presented with technological options. I would do the forms first, given the chance.
Bottom up IT system reimplementations fail much more often than incremental ones.
Bottom up reimplementations of operating human systems that also involve big bang IT implementations are even worse, by comparison to incremental evolutions, mixing incremental automation with incremental process improvement.
And it usually only takes one high-profile failure of a big-bang implementation to derail a broad reimplementation process, whereas the occasional incremental setback on an incremental improvement process is rarely politically significant to the overall process.
So, no, I disagree with your recommendation that this should instead have been done with a more waterfall-style approach.
The argument in the article for gradual change sounded reasonable to me. Just moving a process online is at least a first step.
> 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.
Re: should they just be database entries? he did do this or make other changes when the department agreed.
Except to redesign the processes you need buy in and co-operation from multiple different people and departments and good enough project management and communication with all of them to ensure that the thing you replace the forms with will actually do the same job.
Whereas moving existing forms online in the same structure can be done with minimal management agreement and provides a quick win.
Especially when you're talking about 344 forms. Redesigning all the back office processes for 344 forms would be a gargantuan task.
> Instead, this should be done department-by-department, app-by-app. Design the process from the bottom up.
It is a technical way. "Do not mind people, just make tech to work". This way have its benefits, like it tends to make result to have better design, but what about people? They work and they think that their work is important and valued. But "hey, some engineer came and started to make it his way without any reverences to us". It is humiliating, and such engineer could face a resistance.
The author made a genius' move which I might expect from a psychologist or any other social oriented person, not from tech-savvy engineer: he started to make life of a people better. He asked their opinion on how they think it would be made better. He showed respect. He showed people that he sees them as people, not as gears in a clockwork mechanism. They reacted as people generally tend to react to this: they welcomed him. Probably it helped that it was government bureaucracy which likely treat people as gears in a clockwork, so his way of treating people contrasted nicely to the way they used to.
I have expertise in the space and while I would have agreed with you 10 years ago, I disagree today.
There are billion dollar programs that can be replaced by a Google Form. You’re always going to lose if you are too accommodating. Every one of these dopey workflows has a unit of FTEs on payroll in the backend!
Get High level sponsorship, hard deadline and most things will be doable within reasonable constraints. The stuff that isn’t doable is the hard work, which you will never discover until it’s forced.
Great idea! I wonder why nobody has ever thought about that before! You must be the first! A modern day Prometheus!
The highlighted part about the fact that it takes 30 minutes to make a change, and FIVE WEEKS to get sign-off is spot on. I fucking hate bureaucracy. But you know what happens if you don't take the FIVE WEEKS to get sign-off? Nothing.
> For that matter, should the department that manages them even exist?
Yeah, nothing better then complete reorganization by someone who has no idea about the work being done, needs and pressures.
What will happen here is that they will quickly realize you dont know what you are doing but are threat, so whoever will have option will easily stall you.
Wasn’t one of the the points of the article the complete opposite of this comment? You can improve the process without having to overhaul the whole thing. They don’t need to flip their tech stack for forms.
It seems more like a classic case of refactoring except that the original infrastructure is paper-based, in which case the ideal digital redesign would be one that mimics the paper-based one precisely so that "regression testing" can be performed and components can be swapped in piecewise. Once enough components are digitized, the system as a whole can begin to be molded into more effective forms. This would have to be the plan at the outset, since it would require preserving enough flexibility.
A lot of government agencies lack the budgeting required to go through a process of "as-is" and "to-be". This process is both lengthy and costly and is usually reserved for the main portion of that agencies workload.
Workflows and form-related processes are a little like desire paths, true. Over time people establish ways of working that define the business logic of a company. Some of it is codified on paper, some in the culture and interactions, and it all tends to slowly change over time.
There is a lot of value in the existing processes. That's what the business is built on. Proposing to drastically change how things work while promising that the result will be at least as good or better -- that's a tough sell for a lot of reasons. It also seems incredibly risky, projects like that are no easy feat.
I think a gradual, incremental approach would have a higher chance of adoption and eventual success. Small asks that produce tangible improvements, building towards a systemic changeover.
Your misunderstanding of how things work in government is at least as egregious as the author's misunderstanding of this idealized way to redesign processes.
What I've seen continually in government is the dreaded form-builder Frankenstein.
1. Gov thinks it needs some simple form building
2. Chooses a vendor form building framework, some mashup of ASP.NET usually with workflow tools
3. Oh, we'd like documents stored, and an integration with another system, and a custom reporting tool, and a payment function, and a appointment booking.
4. Vendor doesn't want to lose business so builds custom code into the "simple" form/workflow tool.
All of sudden the simple form tool is customized beyond belief, falls behind on updates and becomes impossible to change. Worst still, nobody wants to invest in it because it just-about-works.
FTA: That sort of works, but it also creates a weird dynamic because the tech teams don’t have the training nor the explicit mandate to mess around with other people’s jobs.
Here in Belgium, I did that kind of work for 14 years. The fact is that you have to have in your IT team people knowledgeable with business. When I say knowledgeable, I mean, they understand the business at least as well as the business people themselves. When you talk to business with that kind of team, it's much easier.
Now, the problem I had is not the form, it's the business process behind. Changing these is super hard because inertia is there. Also you have to take into account years and years of little shortcuts, exceptions, etc. that somehow now are part of the process. It's really tough to bring everything together.
Reminds me of this interview with Elon Musk, where he talks about Conway's Law and how they mitigate it at SpaceX: https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg?t=206
It's very hard to design an efficient system when the people writing the requirements and the people implementing them don't really understand or talk to each other.
One likely factor for Josh Gee's notable successes is his youth. Because he's outside of the power structures and politics.
I started "adult" (office) work at 15yo. I got a lot done. Everyone loved the geeky computer whiz who could fix stuff. I got bonuses, perks, praise. This track record set me up for long-term failure.
By the time I turned 25yo, I hit a wall. I was now an adult. With my own power. So I was now perceived as a threat. Sadly, I was completely oblivious to the changed dynamic. And I didn't have a mentor or any one else to clue me in.
Since then, I've encouraged promising young talent to color outside the lines (eg be bold, don't wait for permission) while they still can.
Just from his writing style, I think Josh Gee will avoid my mistakes.
> I put in my earbuds, fired up a podcast, and started going line by line through the list. That took about 2 months. I would open the PDF, see if it was a form, and log it.
You can see this guy is not a developer because he didn't spend 2 months learning machine learning and computer vision while trying to automatize the form classification task only to give up after 6 months and do it by hand anyway.
And clearly government because he didn't spend 10 dollars in mechanical turks to do it in 24 hours.
PDFs for forms are truly terrible and barely work[1] in anything except Adobe Reader. Online forms are not without their problems, especially from the maintenance point of view, but significantly more accessible to the normal people, especially for the mobile phones, if designed properly.
This is the first step of digitization: Putting electricity on the paper. But it's only the beginning. For the long-tail it may be good enough. But for lots of government forms there are so much more that can be done.
Like, we discovered some absurd amount of forms sent to us (like 90% or so) had errors that actually would make the applicant ineligible for whatever the form was for. Stuff like "if you answered X on Q14.2c, you have to answer Q32.5". All this is something good UX and logic can help make a breeze. Instead of a huuuge form to cover all edge cases, it only expands when veering from the happy-path.
Also, next step of digitization is actually getting the data as structured data. So that it's automatically put into whatever software the govemp uses to handle the form. Without that, majority of the amount of time spent from a caseworker can be to just transcribe the form into application before it's actually being worked on. Next step after that is of course to automatically approve/deny stuff. If not for everything, there are lot of simple cases that often don't need much scrutiny.
A big step is to actually get the gov to change the process/law. Putting electricity to paper is a small win over the incredible wins with just fixing the process.
Like one form I worked on was so complicated (maternity/paternity leave) because the law had basically hundreds of small edge cases accrued over the years. Either to fix a loop-hole, or to help some group of people a bit extra. But that just ends up in regulation not even the experts approving these forms understand. It's a hard battle and can take years. Like, sometimes a new rule the politicians invent will cost far more to implement and execute for the small case, than just making it apply to everyone and grant them some extra money...
Great article. It felt true to my experience working with govt employees, and I’m impressed that this person had the tenacity to achieve the success that they did.
Unfortunately I also think this is the kind of stuff its really easy to write a cheap headline about.
“BOONDOGGLE: BOSTON SPENDS $150,000 AND 2 YEARS MAKING PAPER FORM INTO WEBSITE”
There, that’s 100,000 shares on a headline that no one will really care to read the details of.
The amount of GAFAM dependencies here is impressive. So Google has all the dead certificate request made by Boston resident ? And more ?
I don't like this one bit. And the article didn't even mention if they try to use something else, so I guess they didn't even try.
From my point of view, paper is better than any Gafam
But it's not about government bureaucracy - it's about making both the lives of your coworkers and your fellow citizens just a bit better. That can actually remarkably fulfilling.
I'm working with a group of doctors practice in London on their digital plans at the moment, and I love it.
> We’ve got a lot of users and a lot of submissions flowing through SeamlessDocs. They are a great tool, but our contract is structured in such a way that makes continued expansion tough.
I feel like an Open Source version of SeamlessDocs would be incredibly useful to tackle these issues not just in the US.
Are there people here who would be interested in building anything like this? Let me know.
The focus on not attempting to improve the forms or workflow alongside the porting of the docs online is key. Cuts down on potential errors, increases buy-in from stake holders and doesn’t turn this into some insurmountable task of being a consultant for several dozen city departments.
Sometimes the best form is no form at all. The Washington state license/registration process was incredible, just show up with the documents and they ask some questions and type the relevant stuff in for you. Compare to the ridiculous waste of time and paper in NY where you have to arrive with about half a dead tree of redundant information that they just retype into a computer anyway.
As a more general point, living in multiple states shows you how much bloated government is a complete waste of time when other states just don't do it and get along fine - other examples are car inspections and even income or sales tax.
Did the city decide to simply eliminate any of the functions the forms you found did instead of moving them online?
> A submission emailed to them. A PDF of the submission dropped into a Google Drive folder. A line added to a Google Sheet spreadsheet with the submission data.
This all sound great for the city, but it makes me concerned about privacy. At least with the form somebody had to be in physical access to steal the information. Now they just need access to one cog’s Google drive.
It takes less than 5 seconds to pull out a form, scrawl a name and check a box. It can be done anywhere and with no tools other than the form and a pen.
Just finding a computer will take longer for people who don’t sit in front of one all day, then navigate an app, a browser, etc, etc.
You’ll find most people just end up clicking “print” when they do find your beautiful web form and then write on the paper copy.
At my company we use Github Issues for all task management. Like this author discovered, it is underrated.
SaaS products like Asana and Trello have prohibitive pricing models for what we consider pretty minor integrations. Jira is too complicated. I have seen some open source projects recently.
[+] [-] ccleve|5 years ago|reply
There's an old saying: don't pave cow paths. That's exactly what he was doing. He was putting a different front end on an existing process. You end up with a total nightmare.
Instead, this should be done department-by-department, app-by-app. Design the process from the bottom up. For example: a form to request some document. Start with the documents: how are they stored? Should they be stored differently? Are they in a database? Should we really even be storing documents, or should they just be database entries? For that matter, should the department that manages them even exist? (Here in Chicago, the answer was no. They merged the County Recorder of Deeds office with the County Clerk.)
You should never just move things online. The web is different, and enables different business processes. Change the process first. Forms come later.
[+] [-] saul_goodman|5 years ago|reply
This guy managed to achieve his mandate AND managed to entice groups to investigate updating their workflows after the fact. I agree it's not the way things SHOULD work, but he managed to find a way to make the most amount of progress and along the way some kingdoms were enticed to cycle back around and improve their workflows too.
[+] [-] sputr|5 years ago|reply
What you are proposing most of the time will not because it would require an immense, truly Herculean, amount of political will and backing.
Redesigning processes clashes with the #1 rule of big systems: processes are ruled by people whose jobs depend on them. And they WILL fight tooth and nail to keep those jobs. The bigger the change, the more threatened they will feel, the more they will sabotage you.
And you know what the #2 rule of big systems is: no matter what "the boss" may say, if the officials are not on board it's just not going to happen.
If you have not, I suggest watching "Yes minister" :).
[+] [-] spelunker|5 years ago|reply
The author later brings up the questions you mentioned - what is a form, should these forms exist, etc, but instead of spending a long time trying to design an entire new system _when that wasn't even asked of them_ they decided to deliver results. Once they gained trust and got buy-in by the city, they could think bigger.
[+] [-] williamsmj|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CityOfThrowaway|5 years ago|reply
Change is hard. Radical change, all at once inside a big organization is near impossible.
In this case, it’s a great first step to get all this info out of paper and wooden inboxes and into a more accessible form.
Doing so still leaves open the potential for reinventing high-priority forms and workflows. It also makes it easier, because now the team can easily ask questions like, “how many people use this?” And “how much time do we spend on this?” Etc.
In short, while you might be right wrt. producing innovation, sometimes the first step is to just put it on the internet.
[+] [-] corwinstephen|5 years ago|reply
When your process happens on paper, there's nothing forcing you to ensure it makes logical sense. You can draw whatever you want on a piece of paper, so a lot of the paper forms that people call "permits" are just messy reflections of the thought process of the person who originally conceived the process. Naturally, products that start by directly replicating a paper form are accommodating and perpetuating the lack of planning.
We've kind of taken a backwards approach where we don't accommodate direct translation of forms and instead provide tools that encourage people to think through the steps of their permitting processes to get them to make sense on a digital platform. More often than not, they discover glaring inefficiencies in the process which when fixed make everything work more smoothly even independent of the move to a digital platform.
Shameless plug: https://citygro.ws
[+] [-] at_a_remove|5 years ago|reply
Instead, we got endless bikeshedding about "the process" and during that, many unrealistic expectations were conjured into existence as each process was re-imagined into kind of ultimate, abstract form of near infinite configurability. Try to imagine sitting at a table as someone says, with complete seriousness, that people ought to be able to submit a multiple one terabyte (not mega or giga, tera) files with a particular webform. Not any other transfer protocol, either. And this is back around 2008 or so. It should just ... expand as necessary.
Nor was this the only time I encountered this kind of behavior. I have seen functionaries whose visions of process suddenly bloat like that "elephant's toothpaste" when presented with technological options. I would do the forms first, given the chance.
[+] [-] jimmaswell|5 years ago|reply
Is this picture a bad thing? https://i.redd.it/uj5ehfdxn5o31.jpg
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
Bottom up IT system reimplementations fail much more often than incremental ones.
Bottom up reimplementations of operating human systems that also involve big bang IT implementations are even worse, by comparison to incremental evolutions, mixing incremental automation with incremental process improvement.
And it usually only takes one high-profile failure of a big-bang implementation to derail a broad reimplementation process, whereas the occasional incremental setback on an incremental improvement process is rarely politically significant to the overall process.
So, no, I disagree with your recommendation that this should instead have been done with a more waterfall-style approach.
[+] [-] jimmaswell|5 years ago|reply
> 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.
Re: should they just be database entries? he did do this or make other changes when the department agreed.
[+] [-] codeulike|5 years ago|reply
Whereas moving existing forms online in the same structure can be done with minimal management agreement and provides a quick win.
Especially when you're talking about 344 forms. Redesigning all the back office processes for 344 forms would be a gargantuan task.
[+] [-] ordu|5 years ago|reply
It is a technical way. "Do not mind people, just make tech to work". This way have its benefits, like it tends to make result to have better design, but what about people? They work and they think that their work is important and valued. But "hey, some engineer came and started to make it his way without any reverences to us". It is humiliating, and such engineer could face a resistance.
The author made a genius' move which I might expect from a psychologist or any other social oriented person, not from tech-savvy engineer: he started to make life of a people better. He asked their opinion on how they think it would be made better. He showed respect. He showed people that he sees them as people, not as gears in a clockwork mechanism. They reacted as people generally tend to react to this: they welcomed him. Probably it helped that it was government bureaucracy which likely treat people as gears in a clockwork, so his way of treating people contrasted nicely to the way they used to.
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
There are billion dollar programs that can be replaced by a Google Form. You’re always going to lose if you are too accommodating. Every one of these dopey workflows has a unit of FTEs on payroll in the backend!
Get High level sponsorship, hard deadline and most things will be doable within reasonable constraints. The stuff that isn’t doable is the hard work, which you will never discover until it’s forced.
[+] [-] hellohello1|5 years ago|reply
The highlighted part about the fact that it takes 30 minutes to make a change, and FIVE WEEKS to get sign-off is spot on. I fucking hate bureaucracy. But you know what happens if you don't take the FIVE WEEKS to get sign-off? Nothing.
[+] [-] watwut|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, nothing better then complete reorganization by someone who has no idea about the work being done, needs and pressures.
What will happen here is that they will quickly realize you dont know what you are doing but are threat, so whoever will have option will easily stall you.
[+] [-] ziziyO|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokipin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGaiser|5 years ago|reply
In government that can easily mean the forms coming never.
[+] [-] ggm|5 years ago|reply
Not said by any dairy farmer. If you believe this, you never shovelled cowshit. Believe me, dairy cow paths and pens are paved, for a reason.
Pave cow paths, but start at the dairy and work backwards.
[+] [-] gregd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btbuildem|5 years ago|reply
There is a lot of value in the existing processes. That's what the business is built on. Proposing to drastically change how things work while promising that the result will be at least as good or better -- that's a tough sell for a lot of reasons. It also seems incredibly risky, projects like that are no easy feat.
I think a gradual, incremental approach would have a higher chance of adoption and eventual success. Small asks that produce tangible improvements, building towards a systemic changeover.
[+] [-] avmich|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
Do you have case studies for successful process reengineering efforts?
[+] [-] pc86|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] F_J_H|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motoboi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techbio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilikerashers|5 years ago|reply
1. Gov thinks it needs some simple form building 2. Chooses a vendor form building framework, some mashup of ASP.NET usually with workflow tools 3. Oh, we'd like documents stored, and an integration with another system, and a custom reporting tool, and a payment function, and a appointment booking. 4. Vendor doesn't want to lose business so builds custom code into the "simple" form/workflow tool.
All of sudden the simple form tool is customized beyond belief, falls behind on updates and becomes impossible to change. Worst still, nobody wants to invest in it because it just-about-works.
[+] [-] wiz21c|5 years ago|reply
Here in Belgium, I did that kind of work for 14 years. The fact is that you have to have in your IT team people knowledgeable with business. When I say knowledgeable, I mean, they understand the business at least as well as the business people themselves. When you talk to business with that kind of team, it's much easier.
Now, the problem I had is not the form, it's the business process behind. Changing these is super hard because inertia is there. Also you have to take into account years and years of little shortcuts, exceptions, etc. that somehow now are part of the process. It's really tough to bring everything together.
[+] [-] Ajedi32|5 years ago|reply
It's very hard to design an efficient system when the people writing the requirements and the people implementing them don't really understand or talk to each other.
[+] [-] tantalor|5 years ago|reply
Not everybody uses computers. Not everybody has internet access.
Shouldn't paper forms still be available as a last resort?
I'm okay with "online first" but not "online only".
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
One likely factor for Josh Gee's notable successes is his youth. Because he's outside of the power structures and politics.
I started "adult" (office) work at 15yo. I got a lot done. Everyone loved the geeky computer whiz who could fix stuff. I got bonuses, perks, praise. This track record set me up for long-term failure.
By the time I turned 25yo, I hit a wall. I was now an adult. With my own power. So I was now perceived as a threat. Sadly, I was completely oblivious to the changed dynamic. And I didn't have a mentor or any one else to clue me in.
Since then, I've encouraged promising young talent to color outside the lines (eg be bold, don't wait for permission) while they still can.
Just from his writing style, I think Josh Gee will avoid my mistakes.
[+] [-] motoboi|5 years ago|reply
You can see this guy is not a developer because he didn't spend 2 months learning machine learning and computer vision while trying to automatize the form classification task only to give up after 6 months and do it by hand anyway.
And clearly government because he didn't spend 10 dollars in mechanical turks to do it in 24 hours.
[+] [-] xvilka|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?labe...
[+] [-] matsemann|5 years ago|reply
Like, we discovered some absurd amount of forms sent to us (like 90% or so) had errors that actually would make the applicant ineligible for whatever the form was for. Stuff like "if you answered X on Q14.2c, you have to answer Q32.5". All this is something good UX and logic can help make a breeze. Instead of a huuuge form to cover all edge cases, it only expands when veering from the happy-path.
Also, next step of digitization is actually getting the data as structured data. So that it's automatically put into whatever software the govemp uses to handle the form. Without that, majority of the amount of time spent from a caseworker can be to just transcribe the form into application before it's actually being worked on. Next step after that is of course to automatically approve/deny stuff. If not for everything, there are lot of simple cases that often don't need much scrutiny.
A big step is to actually get the gov to change the process/law. Putting electricity to paper is a small win over the incredible wins with just fixing the process. Like one form I worked on was so complicated (maternity/paternity leave) because the law had basically hundreds of small edge cases accrued over the years. Either to fix a loop-hole, or to help some group of people a bit extra. But that just ends up in regulation not even the experts approving these forms understand. It's a hard battle and can take years. Like, sometimes a new rule the politicians invent will cost far more to implement and execute for the small case, than just making it apply to everyone and grant them some extra money...
[+] [-] Bukhmanizer|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately I also think this is the kind of stuff its really easy to write a cheap headline about.
“BOONDOGGLE: BOSTON SPENDS $150,000 AND 2 YEARS MAKING PAPER FORM INTO WEBSITE”
There, that’s 100,000 shares on a headline that no one will really care to read the details of.
[+] [-] Phenix88be|5 years ago|reply
From my point of view, paper is better than any Gafam
[+] [-] notjustanymike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Angostura|5 years ago|reply
I'm working with a group of doctors practice in London on their digital plans at the moment, and I love it.
[+] [-] ramboldio|5 years ago|reply
I feel like an Open Source version of SeamlessDocs would be incredibly useful to tackle these issues not just in the US.
Are there people here who would be interested in building anything like this? Let me know.
[+] [-] ktsosno|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cube00|5 years ago|reply
2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160303073934/https://www.seaml...
Today: https://www.seamlessdocs.com/pricing
[+] [-] jimmaswell|5 years ago|reply
As a more general point, living in multiple states shows you how much bloated government is a complete waste of time when other states just don't do it and get along fine - other examples are car inspections and even income or sales tax.
Did the city decide to simply eliminate any of the functions the forms you found did instead of moving them online?
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
This all sound great for the city, but it makes me concerned about privacy. At least with the form somebody had to be in physical access to steal the information. Now they just need access to one cog’s Google drive.
[+] [-] FounderBurr|5 years ago|reply
It takes less than 5 seconds to pull out a form, scrawl a name and check a box. It can be done anywhere and with no tools other than the form and a pen.
Just finding a computer will take longer for people who don’t sit in front of one all day, then navigate an app, a browser, etc, etc.
You’ll find most people just end up clicking “print” when they do find your beautiful web form and then write on the paper copy.
[+] [-] jackconsidine|5 years ago|reply
SaaS products like Asana and Trello have prohibitive pricing models for what we consider pretty minor integrations. Jira is too complicated. I have seen some open source projects recently.
[+] [-] devtul|5 years ago|reply
Ooh boy, I wonder how long the drop down for cats would be.
[+] [-] DiggyJohnson|5 years ago|reply