OPINION
Hands up if you remember Harvard Graphics? Anybody working with graphics and early PCs in the 1980s would know what I am talking about. In my first office, there was a chap employed as a Harvard Graphics specialist. He could take the fag packet and napkin scribblings of the consultants and turn them into flashy flow diagrams and icons. Management made him redundant and decided the consultants could all learn how to do it for themselves. I can recall highly paid consultants spending an entire day trying to put arrows in the right direction on their diagrams. Even by the excessive standards of the 80s this seemed not to be an overly efficient use of time.
Welcome to the world of self-service. Fast forward 30 years and we have dispensed to a large degree with typists, data-entry people and a whole range of other clerical roles deemed to be inefficient. Nowadays we are encouraged to "go online" to get the information we require, or to enter information that our employers, colleagues, clients, governments and others require of us.
Online forms abound. We are asked to navigate through dreadfully designed forms that demand more information than is necessary because some committee has added more and more questions until everybody around the table has extracted from the hapless employee every conceivable piece of demographic data. This is done with vague appeals to "compliance" because a committee has worried themselves that they might conceivably one day be asked how many of their staff are wombat fanciers and having never lost their "please Sir, me Sir, I have the answer Sir" mentality they impose upon the hexed employee to overshare.
It doesn't stop with necessary information collection or duplication. Now we are asked to choose which category our answers should be stored under. So our wombat fancier is asked to choose between Plushophilia, Zoophilia, Naturalist, Naturist or Marxist (Groucho). After five hours of researching the definitions and worrying about the implications of choosing one over the other and having found the FAQ had FAQ all, they eventually resort to a high-tech solution. They talk to a real live human being, and ask for help.
This scenario is played out daily on every floor of every organisation. I am becoming more and more convinced that it works out to be more efficient if we ditched this self-service model, employed some real human beings who have the great advantage over an online form in that they can instantly work out what goes where and they are adept at taking incomplete, impoverished and ambiguous data and turning it into something useful rather than merely responding "all questions must be answered before submitting".
With chardonnay and Bob Hawke back in fashion, perhaps it is time to bring back some more of the 1980s.
Jim Bright is Professor of Career Education and Development at ACU and a partner at Bright and Associates. Email opinion@jimbright.com. Follow @DrJimBright.
