Artificial Cheese

My new job requires that I complete a small forest’s worth of paperwork before I can call myself an employee.  The layout and organization of these forms is a bit concerning.  I’m flattered that everyone wants to know my name, but I’m not sure that writing my name 20 times on 20 different forms is the way to go.

So I decided to do something about it.  And by “do something”, I mean tell someone else to do something.  That someone else would be my local congressperson, Patrick Murphy.

Mr. Murphy,

I’m a 24 year old software developer.  I was born and raised in the Philadelphia area.  I’ve spent the last two years of my life developing a computer application for the State of NJ to facilitate the death registration and disposition process for the state registrar.

I recently found employment elsewhere in the country, and I am in the process of filling out paperwork required by my new employer.  As I am filling out these forms, I noticed that I am filling out the same information on every form.  Name, address, telephone, etc.

When I completed all of the required forms I was a little disappointed at the lack of organization and practically involved in paperwork.  As a software developer, I am trained to find the most efficient way to gather and process data.  The most obvious way to increase efficiency is to eliminate redundancy.  In this case, the redundancy lies in those few fields that I mentioned above.  Repeatedly writing down the same information literally doubled the time required to fill out those forms.

Although we are moving towards an electronic age it is obvious that even the most advanced country in the world is fueled by paper at its core.  It pains me to think about how much time and and effort is wasted on filling out redundant information. 

The solution is to create a collection of forms that serve to capture commonly requested information, and and forms that request unique information can “extend” these common forms.  Since we are trying to coordinate private industries to rely on one common set of forms, the responsbility lies on the government to provide these common forms to ensure consistency and efficiency.

Creating a collection of common forms will save an immeasurable amount of effort to people in all industries.

You might ask why this effort and investment is necessary when data gathering is slowly becoming electronic.  While developing the death registration system in NJ, our first order of business was to redesign the existing paper form to be more complient with the online system’s form.  The reason was that that existing form could not easily be translated to an online form due to many formatting and procedural issues.  Making this change will lead to a much more clean and efficient information gathering pattern regardless of medium.  Also, clean and organized paper forms will result in a much smoother transition to electronic forms.

Its amazing what a delicate mix of frustration, ambition, and boredom can do to a Sunday night.  I’ll be sure to write a follow up should I ever receive a response.