I had the opportunity of doing some work in a HR-like department recently which handles the manpower administration for a military unit. It is one of those rare places in the military where you get see technology, in the form of computers systems and networks, being employed.
A particular subset of the work there involves generating reports for soldiers being released from service. The system involved doing data entry from a couple of different documents into a web-based form, and the downloading the completed report in a word document, and then opening the document and doing a lot of formatting, before finally printing it out. Then do the similar for maybe about a hundred over documents. In other words, it’s a laborious job, and one that would likely qualify for an entry on thedailywtf.com.
When the process was being explained and shown to me, voices in my head sighed. Coming from a sysadmin/programming background, one important thing you learn is to automate whatever you can, especially repetitive tasks such as this. This was a prime candidate for scripting action, and an area where Visual Studio’s integration with MS Office could be set to good use. It’s a pity that the computer was locked down rather tightly without any chance of doing so though.
Sad.
Such is the sad sad world of cost benefit analysis. The bean counters obviously think its cheaper to pay (unwilling) grunts an insignificant sum of money rather than to invest money in training or outsourcing the development of a more integrated system.
I do hope that the system will improve in time to come, but to see myself doing something similar next year wouldn’t be too far from the truth unfortunately.
Cost VS benefits is one thing, however in regions such as SG/IN etc. the cost of programmers isn’t necessarily an XXX% increase compared to hiring humans to do robot work. More often than not, a one-off 50-60% investment would suffice to achieve massive HR cost reductions afterwards, both in terms of necessary equipment and labor costs. As a business owner that’s regularly in touch with the development of customized solutions, I consider “High-tech manual labor” purely as temporary worst-case patches… it’s essentially a process that repeats itself perpetually, until funds are pulled out to script things out for once and for all.
D., didn’t you solicit a pitch to whoever was in charge there? SG Military reform by our beloved D.! :D
Our beloved D. is just a lowly Lance Corporal without any say in matters. :)