[HN Gopher] What I learned in two years of moving government for...
___________________________________________________________________
What I learned in two years of moving government forms online
(2018)
Author : williamsmj
Score : 220 points
Date : 2021-03-18 04:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| effnorwood wrote:
| Summary - "We are fucked"
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I was in tears with the amount of manual labor on easily scripted
| tasks the author spent. Months of work that could have been
| scripted in a few weeks.
|
| You can't script the human element out, but you can save a whole
| bunch of time clicking through pdfs looking for forms and filing
| github issues.
| beckingz wrote:
| How would you go about programmatically determining if a PDF is
| a form or not?
| abraae wrote:
| Our product automates pdf forms in a specific area (HR).
|
| From experience, the presence of form fields in the PDF will
| tell you that it is a form, but the converse is not always
| true.
|
| Plenty of people flatten their pdfs to remove the form
| fields, or maybe they were never there in the first place.
|
| I believe it's sometimes driven by misguided attempts to stop
| people from "hacking" (aka automating) them.
|
| Or pure incompetence.
|
| Some other things I would have like to see in the article
| would be some details of how they handled signatures. We do
| electronic signatures but it is certainly an area where
| accessibility comes into play.
| prepend wrote:
| Mechanical Turk?
|
| HTTP get each pdf, look for tillable fields? Flag those for
| review.
|
| Even manually, 2 months to review 2000 links is a long time.
| I don't think the author meant he literally sat there for 40
| days, but likely did other stuff too.
| hoten wrote:
| Puppeteer should work. I believe PDF form controls are turned
| in HTML form elements, which can be queried by Puppeteer.
| williamsmj wrote:
| I bet the author learned a huge amount of valuable context and
| domain knowledge by reviewing so many forms "by hand".
| oezi wrote:
| "All of our submissions were handled via Google Drive." stopped
| reading there
| oezi wrote:
| Clarification: How can anybody be serious about such an
| approach that is clearly violating data protection
| requirements?
| hoten wrote:
| Very interesting!
|
| side note but... _why_ do so many articles like to repeat things
| they just said in bigger text? It's usually somewhat spaced
| apart, but in this instance the sentence is repeated (but BIGGER)
| right after its written.
|
| > 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.
|
| > """ <same thing but BIGGER> """
|
| I noticed this sentence is highlighted because it is popular; did
| Medium decide to auto-bigify a pull-quote, or do authors decide
| to do this?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| It sounds like you spent 16,000 hours to save residents 10,000
| hours.
| 3minus1 wrote:
| This is funny, but each year residents should be saving more
| and more.
| jdefelice wrote:
| "They also made government services much more accessible."
|
| I would say the value of making the forms accessible was worth
| it. Also with the flexibility to make changes to the forms in
| the future will save even more time.
| fatboy wrote:
| Plus there's value in just making things better! Not
| everything should be viewed through the eyes of capitalism.
| xvilka wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?labe...
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I wished I had known that when I filled out a form in document
| preview on my Mac a few hours ago, including adding a
| signature.
|
| The process was basically perfect and about as simple as can
| be.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I've filled out lots of PDF forms in Firefox and Chrome without
| issue.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Because they license Adobe's engine to handle the PDFs
| anoncake wrote:
| Firefox uses PDF.js, Chrome's reader is based on Foxit.
| specialist wrote:
| Nice writeup.
|
| 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.
| ktsosno wrote:
| 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.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| > _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.
| cube00 wrote:
| I also noticed the GitHub issues are full of city officials'
| names and email addresses, the perfect base to set up a social
| engineering attack. I really don't understand why all those
| GitHub issues need to be publicly accessible like this, all it
| takes is one team member to inadvertently post something
| sensitive and you're stuffed.
| prepend wrote:
| City official names and emails are usually public records and
| are in Boston. So it's no more of a risk than current levels.
|
| There is a risk of posting the wrong info, but that should be
| acceptable given the unlikely probability of that happening
| and the harm of when it does. Posting a citizens form is
| really bad, but posting meeting minutes probably isn't too
| bad.
|
| I think it's important to consider the risk vs the benefit.
| How much is having better collaboration and avoiding a JIRA
| license worth?
| tantalor wrote:
| > Get rid of paper forms... moving those forms online ... made
| government services much more accessible
|
| 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".
| kgin wrote:
| Government can never be anything-only. About 20% of adults in
| the United States are considered functionally illiterate and
| 10% are almost entirely illiterate. There will always need to
| be the option to speak to a human who can assist you.
|
| https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
| mrtksn wrote:
| > Shouldn't paper forms still be available as a last resort?
|
| No, not really. The edge cases are easily resolved by helping
| out those who cannot use the standard method. A friend, a
| random stranger or a clerk would gladly fill an online form
| when someone is having troubles.
|
| Upkeep of a parallel infrastructure is hard and expensive.
|
| If it's not THAT rare it instantly becomes a service that is
| provided by a shop close to the place where the papers were
| supposed to be filled.
|
| I've seen that in Bulgaria where clerks would fill online or
| paper forms for you in exchange of a small fee and in Turkey
| there's a bookstore close to official buildings that will help
| you with all kind of form. There used to be people with
| typewriters hassling around public offices that would fill
| forms for you too.
|
| Nowadays in Turkey the online government services are very
| good(you can do everything online, including everything from
| health services to subscription cancellations), so these seized
| to exist and if there's some who cannot use the online stuff, a
| local shop or the clerks in a public office would help them
| out.
| cratermoon wrote:
| psst: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26512281
| mrtksn wrote:
| Interesting edge case that can be solved by booklet or a
| person with half an hour time explaining how these things
| work or simply help them out instead of upkeep of a paper
| processing infrastructure through institutions.
| woodruffw wrote:
| My parents, who have decidedly _not_ been in prison for
| the last 30 years, can barely fill out most digital forms
| (especially ones on the Web) on their own. They both have
| professional degrees and have used computers since the
| 1980s.
|
| Assuming that someone who has likely never touched a
| computer before can operate at or above that level seems
| like a fast track towards ensuring that they remain
| marginalized and even further isolated from social
| services. That, in turn, has long term expenses that, I'd
| expect, dwarf the costs of a few hardcopies and a data-
| entry clerk.
| cratermoon wrote:
| "edge case"? Take a look at how many Americans are under
| the control of the carceral system. Dismissing the
| reality of how we treat prisoners in the US smacks of
| elitism.
| blendergeek wrote:
| I am only okay with online only if all online forms strictly
| stick to open standards and protocols and require no data
| collection besides what is strictly necessary for the forms.
|
| When I have to agree to a "Terms of Service" on a third party
| website to get my drive license and these Terms have a
| mandatory arbitration clause and leave this private entity
| with the ability to ban me for any reason, I will
| understandably be upset.
|
| All government forms must be accessibly to all. If internet
| is required to use government forms, internet access must not
| be cut off to anyone without due process of law. The same
| goes to electricity and the ability to use electronic
| devices.
|
| If the main computing devices available are Google
| Chromebooks, Apple iPads, and Microsoft Tablets, the user's
| ability to log in can be restricted at the drop of a pin by a
| faceless corporate entity. While it may still be possible to
| access the internet on some of these devices without agreeing
| to the TOS, this can change. If the government certificate
| expires, then the device will need to be updated. Updates
| almost always require a TOS agreement.
|
| No private corporations should be able to ban people from
| using government forms without due process of law.
|
| So yes, I am okay with online only, but only in a world where
| all software can be used by all users for any purpose without
| threat of revocation from extra-judicial private overlords.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| It is a significant reduction in scope and cost if you:
|
| 1. Make it online only
|
| 2. Let people use computers for free at city hall and libraries
|
| 3. Have folks around who can help if they get stuck
| thechao wrote:
| Paper forms are available ... where? In my county, the only
| place to get a paper form is by printing it out. A lot of
| people use the library to get access to a computer ... to print
| the form.
|
| I'm not saying "no" to paper, I'm just talking about the
| reality that having a computer in at least one part of the
| process is mandatory.
| prepend wrote:
| Kiosks at city hall and libraries help with this, but I think
| the simplest way to support this is to have each online form be
| printable (or have a form to request a paper version) and then
| an address to mail it with a message like "online forms usually
| processed in 1-2 days, mailing forms depends on postal service
| and may take 4-6 weeks"
|
| And just do data entry on the few paper forms that make it past
| this and don't think about it.
|
| This is contingent on being able to have an alternate renderer
| that spits out pdf based on the form definition that should be
| dead simple.
|
| I work in an org with lots of forms. People were weird that
| they wouldn't accept a screen that said "Prepend approved on
| 3/18 at 1055" and would do weird things like print out the
| screen and ask for signatures or say funny stuff like "the law
| requires a paper signature." So the pdf killer equivalent added
| a "view form" button that just displayed the old form, filled
| in from the same record with "Digitally signed by prepend on
| 3/18 at 1055" in the signature box. Seems stupid but worked
| wonders. Some people would print that out and save it, but that
| doesn't slow anyone down but the printer.
| TotempaaltJ wrote:
| I don't think anything about this article implies that there's
| no non-tech way to utilize these services after this change.
| Most governments have laws banning that anyway.
|
| A quick browse of boston.gov shows at least all forms I could
| immediately find have an in-person alternative listed on the
| website.
| jeffgreco wrote:
| Boston has a number of ways to access online services,
| including free public wi-fi, libraries, and even a mobile City
| Hall that brings services directly to different neighborhoods:
| https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/promising-practices/bost...
|
| More accessible than requiring someone to go to a City Hall
| basement!
| raverbashing wrote:
| Moving the forms online makes it easier even if the person
| using the system is still the office clerk.
|
| Sure, they'll have to fill the form themselves, but it is
| already online. So it is one (main) workflow regardless of who
| does it.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| 100% spot on here.
|
| There are a significant number of people who use their phone as
| the primary or even sole method of internet access. And that's
| not just low income people but also young adults. When you
| start counting homeless people who primarily use the library
| (if open), you have another problem.
|
| I've worked in various "digital divide" issues for almost 10
| years. Online first is okay but we _can 't_ wipe out the
| offline approaches without leaving large swathes of people
| without any feasible options.
|
| Innovate but make sure you're considering your constituents'
| needs.
| Phenix88be wrote:
| 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
| etripe wrote:
| For those similarly confused as I was, Gafam seems to be the
| acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.
|
| I'm sure I would agree to Google and Facebook being bad in this
| situation. I'm mostly convinced about Amazon, too, but why
| Apple and Microsoft?
| ramboldio wrote:
| > 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.
| impostervt wrote:
| I'd love a product that is just "drag a pdf into a window and
| we'll turn it into a form". It looks like seamlessdocs does
| that, and then lets you edit the resulting form. But they're
| focused on governments, and I still have to fill out stupid
| forms for my company on paper (usually health care or tax
| documents or paycheck stuff) because they send THOSE on to
| whichever company we've outsourced that work to.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| It's not even my final form
| jackconsidine wrote:
| 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.
| devtul wrote:
| > Dogs (can this be a drop down as well from 0-9)
|
| Ooh boy, I wonder how long the drop down for cats would be.
| wiz21c wrote:
| 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.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| 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.
| motoboi wrote:
| > 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.
| josefresco wrote:
| Form Yes/No certainly but mechanical turks can't handle this
| part:
|
| "I also reviewed contracts and documentation and interviewed
| employees in the various city departments to ask if they had
| other forms."
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Impressive credit to the author for writing an interesting
| article about the least interesting topic imaginable: government
| bureaucracy.
| Angostura wrote:
| 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.
| dsego wrote:
| For administrative fees maybe there could be a digital version of
| the tax stamp?
| codingdave wrote:
| The entire landscape of this problem changed this year -- The
| latest version of Word now can open PDFs and edit the content,
| then save back to PDF. PDFs are no longer roadblocks, they are
| now a document type that just works.
| jdsnape wrote:
| only if you can afford to buy word, surely?
| codingdave wrote:
| True, but most government entities I work with use Word as
| their primary authoring tool, so that isn't a major barrier.
| munificent wrote:
| I think the people filling these forms out are generally
| citizens of Boston, not city employees.
| ccleve wrote:
| 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.
| techbio wrote:
| The iceberg image at the top of the article fails to show how
| much of an actual iceberg is beneath the surface.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| williamsmj wrote:
| > 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.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. A lot of what I deal with at my job is
| similar. The people doing the work just don't want people
| coming in telling them new ways to do things. It doesn't help
| that vendors are constantly promising the sky and leaving
| them with broken things. But once you start showing them
| small incremental improvements they start to discover the
| next step etc. Then they see how machines can help them and
| make suggestions.
|
| In my field there's a very well-known example of a MRI
| manufacturer who has made very "smart" systems that end-users
| simply refuse to use. Technologists know how to operate a
| scanner, when a machine starts trying to help them it's very
| difficult for them to (1) understand what the machine is
| doing and how to work with it and (2) trust the machine,
| primarily because physicians yell at people, not machines.
| There are maybe 10-20% of the technologists that "get it" and
| want to tinker and learn how to use the new features. The
| rest still miss the way scanners worked 20 years ago--because
| they understood and trust them.
|
| That's the thing with paper forms--people can understand
| what's happening, discover the process and figure out how to
| succeed and not to be yelled at. When it disappears into a
| machine it might as well be a blind and deaf new hire who
| keeps messing with your desk. It's a major issue of trust.
|
| So the parent's "no it needs to be this giant reinvention
| when strangers who don't do the work come in and tell you
| that you need to do everything differently" attitude maybe
| works with management.
|
| I honestly think the big problem here is that we don't seem
| to have systems that people can play with to build their own
| ideas anymore. Maybe sharepoint but my god I can't even
| figure out how to do anything on that. It really boggles my
| mind that we have things like iPads and iPhones but nothing
| like Hypercard.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Design the process from the bottom up
|
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| > 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.
| sputr wrote:
| Except what he did resulted in progress.
|
| 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" :).
| watwut wrote:
| Sure. But also, lets admit that software developers are not
| qualified to redesign processes of institutions they dont
| understand, so fighting them is pretty often rational from
| institutional point of view.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| If the processes of an institution can't be explained to a
| real, qualified software engineer, the issue runs much
| deeper than just resisting to change.
| ghaff wrote:
| People don't like to be told they have to change the way they
| do things because... the computer.
|
| Years ago, I was at a very small company that used Exchange.
| We had some outages and it was just a lot of administrative
| overhead in a world in which Gmail was by then an option.
|
| But one person in particular fought the change strongly
| because they were used to a business/sales process that used
| hierarchical folders to keep documents organized and Gmail,
| at the time, only had single level labels. The CEO mandated
| the change anyway but the other person never accepted that
| Gmail was suitable for our needs.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Change the process first. Forms come later.
|
| In government that can easily mean the forms coming never.
| cratermoon wrote:
| That's just as true for the corporate world. Check out the
| business processes of, say, a global telecom that's been
| around since the era of party lines. SAP SE makes buckets of
| money from big corporations that just want computerized file
| cabinets.
| ziziyO wrote:
| 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.
| spelunker wrote:
| 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.
| codeulike wrote:
| 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.
| corwinstephen wrote:
| 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.
|
| Shameless plug: https://citygro.ws
| [deleted]
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| > _...the way things like this should be done._
|
| Do you have case studies for successful process reengineering
| efforts?
| avmich wrote:
| Did you try to do something like that - moving a government
| office into digital world? What is your personal experience
| with this?
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| hellohello1 wrote:
| 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.
| ordu wrote:
| _> 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.
| tokipin wrote:
| 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.
| gregd wrote:
| 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.
| motoboi wrote:
| I'd love to read more about this view. Do you know any good
| books about this subject (government digitalisation)?
| saul_goodman wrote:
| 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.
| m-watson wrote:
| In DC their in house 'innovation team' tried to overcome some
| of these issues and make them more useful to the people using
| the forms by having an annual formapalooza. Results were
| mixed but it is an interesting approach to digitization and
| human centered design.
|
| https://thelabprojects.dc.gov/formapalooza
| drc500free wrote:
| Great point. With the Federal Govt that often breaks down to
| "agencies that use GSA as a service provider" and "agencies
| that roll their own."
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| I haven't done a lot of work in government, but I have done a
| lot of work in orgs with distributed power structures, and
| this is 100% correct. Starting from the ground up means
| constructing a working group for every single workflow in
| which everyone who is even theoretically a stakeholder (and
| many people who aren't) is going to demand to be in the room
| and be heard. Once you get past 4-5 people, good luck holding
| a meeting more than once every few months, and if a single
| powerful stakeholder doesn't like what you are doing or
| perceives that you are stripping them of power, they will gum
| up the process until it fails. I've had 4-5 value adding
| initiatives crushed in this manner at past jobs.
|
| IMO, the optimal strategy in such an environment is to get at
| least one powerful champion on your side who can give you
| political cover, and then to quietly construct a MVP while
| soliciting feedback from high performing rank and file in the
| departments of interest who you know (ie no other power
| brokers besides your champion(s)). If you can deploy a value
| adding MVP it becomes difficult for antagonists to intervene
| and kill the project without appearing petty, and then you
| can really get to work building the product you want.
| m463 wrote:
| I sort of imagine some departments opting for a webform-to-
| fax gateway :)
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Do you see any middle ground between the 'rebuild everything
| from the ground up' and 'rework the user interface' type
| approaches?
| jimmaswell wrote:
| That saying is strange because cow paths usually represent the
| most direct path somewhere that the designer of the space
| failed to imagine.
|
| Is this picture a bad thing?
| https://i.redd.it/uj5ehfdxn5o31.jpg
| floatrock wrote:
| That saying is also oddly appropriate here because the joke
| for anyone who lived in boston is that the city is built on
| paved-over cow paths.
|
| (yes yes fun-police, it's actually a myth
| https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2018/03/06/boston-
| street... but the truth of it being a bunch of ad-hoc cities
| that coalesced into one entity isn't too far off from the
| truth. My favorite bit of Boston artwork is road silhouettes
| of all the Boston-area squares:
| http://andywoodruff.com/blog/boston-squared/ )
| cratermoon wrote:
| Those aren't cow paths, those are people paths. Cows are not
| known for their tendency to walk in straight lines. Edit:
| notice they still had to put up fencing to keep people from
| cutting off even that minimal switchback.
| frenchy wrote:
| This might be a dialect issue. Where I'm from, "cow path"
| is the normal way of saying what also called a "desire
| path" by others. According to the wikipedia, I'm not
| completely out to lunch:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I hadn't heard "cow path" before, but a quick google
| suggested it was a synonym for "desire path" so I went
| with that.
| frenchy wrote:
| It is a strange saying. My guess is this is something that's
| lost in translation--a leaky metaphore--and the people using
| it don't think about real cow paths.
|
| Real world space is (generally) 2 dimensional, and these cow
| paths are often very predictable and sensible. They're
| usually the result of architects thinking that sometimes
| people actually walk or bike, instead of always driving cars.
|
| In the world of bureaucracy & information tech, the space can
| be very convoluted, and shortcuts aren't really the same kind
| of thing (queue XKCD comic on spacebar heating).
| jimmaswell wrote:
| 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.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| 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?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Fantastically written article. Fantastic article. It's always
| great to have both.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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...
| zentiggr wrote:
| All very valuable and extremely on point for the person/team
| who will be taking over the process after the OP.
|
| I've had my own very small share of experience delving into
| existing workflows and teasing out the early/simple cases and
| only getting into further processing once the basic conditions
| are met. It can be an interesting challenge to get those who do
| the current processing to see where efficiencies can be teased
| out.
|
| The level of legal/higher management mandates for significant
| process changes is something I've never had to deal with, but
| I've seen the edges of just how crazy the complications can
| get. (I once did an implementation of Form 1040 handling via
| spreadsheet... I was surprised to find that proper math
| REQUIRED a circular reference and iterating to correct
| numbers.)
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| 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.
| known wrote:
| In my experience it's e-Redtape :)
| ilikerashers wrote:
| 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.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I work in medical and there the top guys often make decisions
| that are really hard to implement in software. If they
| understood only a little of the consequences of their decisions
| have they would probably think a little more about the rules
| they are creating.
|
| I see the same in product development. Marketing comes up with
| something that has words like "most of the time", "sometime" or
| "somehow" in the description. Really hard to impossible to
| implement. When I ask them what they really want to achieve we
| usually end up with something simpler and straightforward that
| fulfills the needs, is well understood and easy to implement.
|
| I think in government with most of the work being outsourcend
| this feedback loop doesn't exist. A committee comes up with
| something and the contractor implements it without questions
| asked. The more complex the work, the more money for the
| contractor.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I work with authentication protocols and access control.
| Product people want magic.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I am fine with product people expressing their wants. But
| we shouldn't accept their requests blindly but put them
| through a reality check. The customer is not always right
| or at least the customer doesn't explain his real problem
| properly.
| cratermoon wrote:
| That's true, but power dynamics don't always align with
| wishes. If the professional recommendations of security
| people weren't so routinely ignored, you'd see a lot less
| stupid breaches. A great many disasters^1 could be
| prevented if experts weren't ignored.
|
| [1]
| https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
| stopyellingatme wrote:
| Nail on the head.
| mattmanser wrote:
| ASP.net with windows workflow foundation hasn't existed for
| like 10 years or something like that.
| wernercd wrote:
| VBA hasn't been updated since 2010... yet it's still going
| strong.
|
| Things like this create a niche and will live longer than
| cockroaches after a nuclear war.
| mattmanser wrote:
| VBA is still the main way of writing macros. There are
| plenty of jobs requiring VBA.
|
| Try and find a job for asp.net webforms and windows
| workflow foundation.
|
| So kinda pointless you posting that really. One is still
| 'current', but the other you'll be writing asp.net core
| with modern MVC.
| cube00 wrote:
| It's scary that they're now locked into SeamlessDocs which has
| stopped publishing its pricing.
|
| 2016:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160303073934/https://www.seaml...
|
| Today: https://www.seamlessdocs.com/pricing
| prepend wrote:
| This is what makes paper forms so hard to crack. Paper and PDF
| is a predictable price that will be about the same in 10 years,
| 20 years, whatever.
|
| Not knowing what SeamlessDocs charges (or will even be around)
| is hard to plan around. They do call out a new contract that I
| think is meant to help with this.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Perfectly normal for this sort of product to not have fixed
| tiers, they've just pivoted off trying to sell to self-serve
| customers, to switching to a different pricing structure.
|
| You can't make money like that if you have to negotiate
| contracts with government agencies.
|
| Not sure how that's scary.
|
| Imagine sending in a salesperson, and occasionally an
| developer, to 5 meetings, each lasting 2 hours, over the space
| of 6 months. Now calculate how long it would take to pay for
| that back at $55 p/m.
|
| And you'll note that the page already had an "enterprise" tier,
| for which you had to enquire.
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