What I learned in two years of moving government forms online (2018)
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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.
> 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.
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.
I think Gov.UK was (and is) great, but it's entirely possible that doing a lift and shift of the paper based forms might have gotten more done in a shorter time.
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" :).
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.
In government that can easily mean the forms coming never.
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.
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
Is this picture a bad thing? https://i.redd.it/uj5ehfdxn5o31.jpg
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).
No use trying to optimise in a week using one brain something that found a local minima (or maxima) over years and multiple people.
Normally the change (and effort) to achieve a better minima (or maxima) has to made on a variable you just can't see or imagine.
Something on the line of Chesterton’s Fence.
(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/ )
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.
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.
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.
Do you have case studies for successful process reengineering efforts?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not said by any dairy farmer. If you believe this, you never shovelled cowshit. Believe me, dairy cow paths and pens are paved, for a reason.
Pave cow paths, but start at the dairy and work backwards.
There is a lot of value in the existing processes. That's what the business is built on. Proposing to drastically change how things work while promising that the result will be at least as good or better -- that's a tough sell for a lot of reasons. It also seems incredibly risky, projects like that are no easy feat.
I think a gradual, incremental approach would have a higher chance of adoption and eventual success. Small asks that produce tangible improvements, building towards a systemic changeover.
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.
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.
[1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
Unfortunately, magic is hard work.
Things like this create a niche and will live longer than cockroaches after a nuclear war.
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.
https://www.indeed.com/q-What-Is-Windows-Workflow-Foundation...
And many more for webforms
https://www.indeed.com/q-Webforms-jobs.html
Niche things live on... as my post states.
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.
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.
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".
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.
More accessible than requiring someone to go to a City Hall basement!
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.
A quick browse of boston.gov shows at least all forms I could immediately find have an in-person alternative listed on the website.
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.
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.
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.
In my case, family fills up the online forms for the elderly. I know that they are not stupid, my father is an Engeneer with masters degree, used to program with punch cards and he still uses Autocad but he is having trouble with online forms. When needed, he sends me a link and I fill up forms for him occasionally. I have other relatives too who are simply not comfortable with computers and we will help them out when needed.
When that's not possible, a clerk will help them out. People tend to be nice to old people, even if they are grumpy.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"I also reviewed contracts and documentation and interviewed employees in the various city departments to ask if they had other forms."
[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?labe...
The process was basically perfect and about as simple as can be.
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...
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.)
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.
From my point of view, paper is better than any Gafam
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?
I'm working with a group of doctors practice in London on their digital plans at the moment, and I love it.
He managed to find a better local minima (at least for the variables he was considering in the first place). The other uncountable variables will probably readjust to a unpredictable future state.
So, what you're saying is that it's an interpretation of a social problem created by someone who's spent far too long doing function approximation? (As someone in this position, i entirely empathise with your interpretation).
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.
2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160303073934/https://www.seaml...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
It takes less than 5 seconds to pull out a form, scrawl a name and check a box. It can be done anywhere and with no tools other than the form and a pen.
Just finding a computer will take longer for people who don’t sit in front of one all day, then navigate an app, a browser, etc, etc.
You’ll find most people just end up clicking “print” when they do find your beautiful web form and then write on the paper copy.
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.
Ooh boy, I wonder how long the drop down for cats would be.
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?
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.
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.
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.
+ check rectangles as % of form
+ flag burned pdfs for review
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.
Is CIFS a better data protection protocol?