The paperwork explosion

In 1967 IBM's office products division commissioned Jim Henson and composer Raymond Scott to create "The Paperwork Explosion," a four-minute advertisement for the MT/ST word-processing machine. It’s frankly NUTS. With jarring dystopian settings, unsettling cast of serious corporate heads, strange music and a bonkers old coot for context. This is how technology should be sold. A four minute mini movie with contemporary orchestral score for a word processor? Brilliant!

It does however make me think rather hard. As a few of you might know I’m some sort of consultancy chappie and apart from my ninja like sales skills, my godlike project management expertise and my zen strategic aura, my area of deep knowledge, the leg of my “T”* as it were, is electronic content management and associated areas. An industry basically invented by this advert and the product it’s pushing. My whole career is in a field which is only forty three years old. Just older than me. Watching this advert again makes me realise how difficult the field I work in is to “solve”**, offices might have a lot less physical paper in them than when I was a lad in the late eighties but there is still quite a lot out there and as for electronic documents, we produce uncounted and unread reams of the damn things every second. So what has changed since 1967 when this lot of serious faces announced a way to deal with the paperwork explosion?***

Frankly very little, in fact it’s got a lot worse.****

Basically the IBM toolset being paraded here isn’t really a way of dealing with the paper work faster, it doesn’t help the mantra of “not enough time and people to do the paperwork”. Paperwork is basically about filing and fetching. This actually makes MORE paperwork quicker. This is one of the first electronic drips of the current electronic content (from Electronic Content Management, or ECM) tsunami which previously was a mostly physical thing like a manual typewriter or lithograph printer. This is important to note, most innovations heralded to solve the paperwork equation are actually ways to make more paperwork faster. The photocopier, microfiche, the laser printer, the mail-sorter, the scanner, email, instant messaging, blogging, micro-blogging etc, all create or duplicate content faster and faster, they don’t help you file it and more importantly they don’t help you find it when you need it.

There are technologies out there to file it and “help” you find it, enterprise document and records management being one and enterprise search being the other, the idea is that you manage creation and storage of your paperwork in such a way as to let you find the stuff when you want it and let you throw it away when you don’t need it. Both sound great and when both were heralded in the mid nineties I thought I’d be out of a job. Fortunately for me but less so for humanity neither works. Users hate being made to file properly so slap the  stuff into your new and very expensive system willy-nilly and because it’s slapped in just about anywhere and called random nonsense you can’t find it with your new search engine so you end up looking for words or terms in the text and finding more stuff that you otherwise would have and you have to spend more time wading through it.

Thus immediately rendering both solutions to the paperwork problem useless.

Lately a new contender has emerged, case management. This from the realisation that most paperwork is made in connection with some sort of business process and that if you could tie the paperwork to the business process and maybe automate it, loads of productivity gains could be made and the paperwork would be properly filed and named automatically. I was one of the leading lights of this particular fantasy and I thought once I’d sold a shed load of this case management stuff I’d be out of a job again. Thankfully once I had sold a shed load of it, the real world rode to the rescue and it turned out case management didn’t work either. Business processes both evolve slowly over time and change radically to cope with external changes. They change at large scales and they change at the micro level. Nailing a business process down inside a workflow or case management engine puts barriers into that change and nailing the paperwork alongside it means that people start skipping over steps of the process to cope with their change load and the paperwork starts to leak out again. Soon you have an even worse situation than just with EDRM and search as you’ve got an irrelevant inflexible business process to maintain, people are working round it not with it and your paperwork is actively being hidden in nooks and crannies everywhere.

I’m starting to think the basic premise is wrong. I’m starting to think that the endless focus on the “system of record” is the wrong place to start. Paperwork isn’t the problem, the explosion of content is just a vector. People are the “problem” and if we fix how they engage with our business processes, our core organisational wotsits etc then we might be able to get ahead of the game. We need to move from thinking about systems of record to thinking about systems of engagement.  We need to think about why people make paperwork, what they do with it, how they move it around and why not how they keep it.

Perhaps there will be a time for ole Ed to look for a new job but it’s not today, not when the problem is as acute as it’s ever been and the solutions are as far away as ever.

*So called because you have broad knowledge, the cap of the “T” and deep knowledge, the leg of the “T”.

** in the early eighties people started talking about the paperless office. Are we nearly there yet Dad?

*** Of course apart that from every single person in this advert has left any form of work and retired or died long ago.

**** apart from some improvement on the workplace sexism thing, notice that the only women in the ad were talking about being secretaries and the typing pool?