If your business process doesn't have a form field for some data, but the person on the ground understands that it's valuable, it's naturally scribbled onto the margins, and then worked into the next version of the form.
If you're using nearly any digital UI, the feedback loop (if it exists at all) is a side channel.
More businesses should just use paper.
This is THE reason why, in the year of our LORD 2024, physicians still HATE electronic medical records. Margins, sticky notes, and red ink you can circle anywhere you d~~n well please, not organized data easily parsed during discovery.
The thing that matters is that it is unstructured.
MediaWiki won't scale to support billions of records in a database, but for small to medium sized things imo it's perfect.
I can't find the discussion can you share the link
… or rather, digital processes shouldn’t throw away the benefits of paper.
E.g.: document databases instead of fixed-schema tabular (paper can accept more data than was anticipated), append-only databases instead of update-in-place (paper doesn’t forget). I’m a big fan of Datomic and similar databases because of that.
Agent taking free form notes might skip parts that are required for other means than job at hand and agent will optimize for work he thinks is important, some general statistics don’t bother him.
Problem is that user on the ground sometimes has to be forced into a scheme of bigger picture of processes.
On the other hand too much data is also being marked as required by business - where ad hoc note would do.
I see this with our customers where they ask us to implement bunch of fields as “must be filled in” just to start complaining that it takes too long to fill all required in - I did not make all of it mandatory on my own it was their business analysis.
The world is highly cursed. The information system which accommodates this is highly blessed.
You might say, “well we can add these formatting features and make the form elements removable and…”. But if you know you know. Asking “normal people” to do all this in markup is an insta-fail. Most of us are caterers, not programmers.
Then again we should always ask ourselves if a drug dealer would ever recommend someone stop doing drugs.
On the other hand, the last 15 months have been "if you don't like the state of the art AI, wait a week", so I may be out of date with that assessment.
Hypermedia didn't go far enough, in the sense that it overlooks how people form relationships with specific documents. In case of margin notes, individuals take an instance of a document template and mark it up to customize it. They recognized that the shape of the form was not the only shape the document could take and they knew that the form was an extension of their authority. So if it didn't make sense they changed it.
You can't really reproduce that experience with hypertext because there's no concept of "this document doesn't apply to this situation let me, the individual user, change it to communicate something unique." And because humans aren't reviewing any of these documents, there's nobody there to interpret it correctly even if you could. Essentially the Internet and web form design and replacement of humans with machines has involved a great abdication of authority from the front-line employees who process these forms. I would argue that it's becoming the downfall of our modern society. If a programmer or analyst couldn't envision your situation, nobody works at the company who can do anything about it.
draft_document.pdf document.pdf final_document.pdf final_final_document.pdf document_final.pdf document_v2.pdf final_final_document_v3.pdf
Which one do I use?
Some people organize their entire lives into boxes and containers and labelled drawers. Some people have, basically, a big pile that they just shuffle through when they need something.
For example, I prefer a backpack that's one or two large compartments. Yet they sell backpacks with dozens of little slots. That's too much for me, but somebody thought people wanted it, so somebody must. Over organization doesn't work for me.
And we all know of the numerous cases where text was blacked out in PDFs by adding black rectangles on top of it, but the text was still contained in the document.
File -> Save As "file-snapshot.doc"
(you're now editing file-snapshot.doc)
File -> Open "file.doc"
File -> Save current as copy "file-snapshot.doc"
(you continue to edit file.doc)