During my undergrad, I worked in a small computer lab in the student government building. It was pretty much the perfect job because most shifts were long afternoons with nothing to do but surf the web and read. Occasionally, if it was particularly slow, I'd sleep.
There were only a few times a year when I actually had to do anything that resembled work. Every so often, student groups were able to apply for funding to hold whatever awkward beer soaked social they had planned.
The process for this used to be, if not simple, at least rational. You, as the president or officer of your group, downloaded the application -- a word document. You then filled it out (in word, they're required to be typed) and turned it into the office by 5pm at which time you also signed up for a hearing slot, so you could present your awkward beer soaked social to the board that gave out funding. When you showed up at your hearing, you were expected to bring seven copies of the application, one for each member of the board. Since these applications run between 15 and 60 pages it can get to be a lot of paper.
Then, in an effort to do ... something, save paper maybe, management decided that we were going to "take the process digital" -- a phrase I heard a lot -- the end result being that the applications would be posted to a website instead of printed out.
Now, if I was going to design this system, I'd keep it simple. It would be easy to set up a webpage where you could sign up for a hearing at the same time you uploaded your completed application. Then since computers are fancy, there's all sorts of thing you could do automagically. Turn it into a PDF. Post it to another page so board members could look at it, etc. Boom. You've gone digital.
What we ended up with is neither simple nor rational. You, as the president or officer of your group download the application. You fill it out then print it and bring it to the office before 5pm where you sign up for a hearing slot. Then someone takes that application, pulls all the staples out, Xeroxes any double sided pages to be single sided, and brings it to someone like me. I take that application and scan it into a PDF. Since using a regular scanner would have been asinine, we bought a $3000 digital sender. It's a scanner with a network card so the PDFs get copied to the webserver automatically. Since the digital scanner has a crappy touch screen, we use abbreviated names for the applications. The abbreviated names don't make sense to anyone but the person who scanned them in, so we create a spreadsheet that maps the abbreviated name to the real name. That spreadsheet is posted to the website, along with all the PDFs which still have cryptic names, by the webmaster.
The old way used to take one person half a day. Once all the applications were in, one person looked through them to make sure they had all the requisite signatures and information before putting them in the appropriate box.
The new way takes three people three days. It takes one person to ensure that all the applications are ready to be scanned, it takes another person to scan them in and it takes the webmaster to actually put them online with the spreadsheet. I've never seen technology used to so thoroughly de-automate a process.
So the next time you wonder why higher education is so expensive, this is it. No one has a clue what they're doing.
Posted by Ben Corman at 4:38 PM