German government will print out all messages on paper and hire thousands of civil servants to read each message. It's gonna be a Beschäftigungswunder.
Well somewhere in Czech Republic, some public servants are receiving well formed digital XML messages, and transcribing values from them manually to an information system. Sometimes they make a mistake and swap some values, which is how we know.
Our governments are a swamp of incompetence concerning anything "Information age". But still my fav story is from the private sector:
In order to "merry" digital and paper form data, they set up a system to send paper forms to Swiss post ("digitization-as-a-service") who routed them to (afair) Bangladesh where cheap workers (used to a wholly different alphabet) manually transcribed stuff as XML and uploaded it to some ftp directory. We SWEs then were supposed to build automated systems based on that handwritten XML data. Obviously, the cost they reduced with cheap labor they had to pay multiple times to have us building a resilient data ingestion system. Why again are we okay with having lawyers and MBAs making decisions?
megous|1 year ago
Information age is upon us.
nforgerit|1 year ago
In order to "merry" digital and paper form data, they set up a system to send paper forms to Swiss post ("digitization-as-a-service") who routed them to (afair) Bangladesh where cheap workers (used to a wholly different alphabet) manually transcribed stuff as XML and uploaded it to some ftp directory. We SWEs then were supposed to build automated systems based on that handwritten XML data. Obviously, the cost they reduced with cheap labor they had to pay multiple times to have us building a resilient data ingestion system. Why again are we okay with having lawyers and MBAs making decisions?