you also didn’t list any pros or cons of either. from my perspective, which is weekly travel for a very large company, moving back to paper is a nightmare. what do i do with my daily receipts? how do i submit this and hope to get reimbursed this year? having to manage this all on paper seems excruciatingly inefficiency
TLDR: Maybe I'm just railing against bureaucracy. I share my techno perfect dream at the end.
"you also didn’t list any pros or cons of either."
Thank you. You're right; I should do that. Long overdue.
Alas, I don't know how to do that.
The best I can do, at this time, is list examples of digital, paper, and hybrids which succeeded and failed. Try to divine RCAs. Then see if there are patterns.
I do have some initial guesses about best use of paper.
1- Organizational boundaries.
Like mediating communication between entities. (It slays me that scripts and referrals are done by fax, which might as well be black boxes, because the communication can fail silently.)
2- Legal stuff.
IDs, cash, voting (ballots), titles (property).
3- Short lived communication (semaphores), coordination, collaboration.
Lo-fi tools for brain storming, designing. Visible tools, like resource planning white boards.
"what do i do with my daily receipts?"
You say that like it's obvious. Of course we should design (engineer) away data entry.
Yet SAP Concur is still a thing, with wide adoption.
JIRA, ServiceNow, PagerDuty are crimes against humanity. Bending the work towards computers, instead of empowering humans.
I've gotten so much shit (from the larger orgs) the times I've moved my teams from heavy weight, labor intensive, error prone tools to lightweight lo-fi tools.
One stupid example: For weekly triage, we'd just print the bug list, and everyone (everyone) could vote, then cc copies of the list as needed. Voila, instant priorities.
The majority of push back is the style documented by Neil Postman's Technopoly. Some people can't wrap their heads around not using computers for everything. It's like the debate between ontologies and folksonomies. People who can't accept ambiguity vs people who can accept "good enough". (Just one over simplification of the psychology. I did pre-caveat by admitting my thinking is muddy.)
###
I've long dreamed of a technical solution.
Some kind of hybrid of HyperCard & wikis backed by version control.
New instances of a CRUD form (both UI and backing data) would just be cloned, a la prototype based classes. Every instance can be customized, a la live editing. Imprint both schemas and forms with a version token, so the system can support multiple variations, so that orgs and evolve processes incrementally (instead of outright cut-overs).
I recently made some progress on bridging the gap between persistence and UIs. I'm trying to reorient my life to resume work.
What's your definition?