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Never underestimate the power of a data entry person working in a high volume organization with an app that looks like it was designed in 1975.

I worked on a potential redesign of the US Navy's medical appointment booking application and the data entry rate and responsiveness of their "ancient" system was far superior to the newly proposed solution (web based).

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I've watched in amazement as a person slammed through green-screen after green-screen to enter data while the new "more productive" GUI interface took everyone 10 times as long. Worse, the damn GUI actually required a longer on-boarding period for the new employees.

I miss companies like Palm that had a person who counted the taps to get something done.

My college, part of a larger university system, was in the first wave of campuses to switch from a hodgepodge of legacy stuff (CICS-based student info system, with other apps probably in classic ASP and ASP.Net, plus other vendor products) to PeopleSoft (Campus Solutions, HCM, Finance, etc.). The major complaints - from students, staff, and faculty alike - were about excessive pageload times and significantly more clicks to do simple things. They added huge sticky headers and layers-upon-layers of portals.

Perhaps the only people happy with the migration were the Oracle sales reps.

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