Comment by rightbyte
2 days ago
I believe many software tools work like a vice for beurocrats making the beurocracy way less efficient.
Like, forcing some not very edge case friendly set of text field validation rules onto the beurocrats such that he can't just do what he tries to do as he could with paper work.
In many orgs. nowadays the processes seem to be made to fit the computer programs not the needs of the beurocracy.
That seems a little backwards. I'm not sure exactly what you mean with making bureaucracy less efficient, but form validation is an example of automated, technologically enforced bureaucracy - in some sense, it's a more efficient form of bureaucracy. It's certainly less flexible, but lack of flexibility is arguably the point of bureaucracy; less flexibility suggests more rather than less efficient bureaucracy.
Yes and no, form validation is a double edged sword: without it whoever receives the data may have to deal with inconsistencies, so removing that will increase efficiency.
However, the flexibility and adaptability of human interaction is lost when an intermediate digital system enforces rules without exception, and that loss can absolutely result in inefficiencies because the world is always changing and your digital models rarely reflect reality.
Let's say you work for a government agency processing stolen bikes. To fill in your form you must select a category of bike, but "fatbike" is not an option as the software was built in 2012. As a human using paper, you could easily talk to your colleagues and agree that you can now check the "e-bike" checkmark and write "fat" beside it to indicate a fatbike. In the software world, some company (hopefully the one that built the original software) will quote you 50k to do it, it won't work correctly, and you'll thank them for the pleasure of dealing with them.
In another example, let's say you have to get a building permit to build an extension to your house, and based on your postal code the system tells you that you are too close to a nature reserve and are not allowed to do any construction, and the system rejects your application. The government has recently ruled that this does not apply anymore to residential housing development, to improve the housing crisis situation, but the software is not up to date with this change. In a paper world the human could simply approve the permit based on their knowledge of the real world, in the software world the computer program will never approve your permit.
This whole thing may sound anti-automation. Its not meant to be, rather its a reminder that the processes we automate should leave enough flexibility and adaptability to deal with the real world. This does not come for free though: the bike system would need to allow you to add categories, or a free-form details field. The permit system should work in an advisory manner, but allow overrides by a professional specifying a reason, or it should allow you to disable/modify/create rules on the fly.
However, no matter what you do, form validation will always leave somebody out in the cold, some edge case uncovered, that a human could always resolve, but a system cannot.
Great points! To be clear, I was not trying to say that automated and strictly enforced bureaucracy is a good thing. The bureaucracy of the form is very efficiently implemented. That's mostly not a good thing (or at least it often has costly consequences), but it is an example of software creating more efficient bureaucracy - efficient as bureaucracy, but often not efficient in fulfilling its supposed goals.
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Thanks for the write up. I am having an emotional crisis having to defend bureaucrats against us. (I conveniently blame their systems not being FOSS, not us programmers blindly following orders. No... not our fault).
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