How Can A Large Corporation CEO Quickly Assess The Need For ESI?
Simple: Count the number of sheets of paper in your organization.
Each and every sheet of paper should be a RED FLAG signaling the need for enterprise-wide zero-latency real-time electronic systems integration. Workers like to walk around with piles of paper. It gives them something tangible that makes them look productive, even if it is often material that someone else created. Paper is NOT a measure of productivity. Every sheet of paper is a direct measure of UNNECESSARY, AVOIDABLE ADMINISTRATIVE COSTS.
A typical “couldn’t care less”, unmotivated, unempowered, “not my job” American office worker prints at least 10,000 sheets of paper a year (over twenty 500-sheet packages of paper for copies, facsimiles, computer print outs, etc.). CEO’s can quickly find the precise number for their organizations by looking at the office paper that they directly pay for.
Wasting 10,000 sheets of office paper requires killing about 1.2 trees PER PERSON per year. This paper-plus-ink/toner has a direct and immediate business expense of roughly $700 per person per year for black, and several thousand dollars for a significant percentage of color images. Color costs nothing extra on a computer display, and paper cannot show animation or interactivity, the way a computer display easily does.
Printer vendors will essentially give you printers almost for free, to get you hooked on buying their expensive ink/toner cartridges. If you had to fill your car gas tank with retail-priced printer ink, each fillup would cost you about $180,000 – They make their profits on the consumable you are wasting uselessly every day - That very-addictive “FREE” printer, ISN’T!
If you look near a local area printer, there is probably a large pile of unproductive cover sheets and pages with only a few lines of useless information. There may even be many sheets printed from the Internet with very-expensive, color advertisements for products that no one needs. Multiply this gross inefficiency times the number of workers in your office, and then times the number of similar offices throughout the world. It adds up to close to a billion dollars worth of useless printed paper in the U.S., PLUS many times more dollars for the time consumed reading, assimilating, and redundantly reprocessing the information on the expensive, unnecessary paper, which may soon be discarded anyway.
Recycling all of this low-value paper has a fractional impact on reducing paper costs and the need to kill trees, BUT when you add up the worker time to recycle, and the energy required to collect and reprocess recycled paper, it is little more than a break even proposition, most of the time.
The Very-High Cost Of Paperwork
Consider the high cost of gathering one page of information on paper. The paper costs a few cents. The printing costs a few cents. Someone had to spend hours or weeks designing the form and getting buy-in from those who would use the form. The cost of modifying such forms is high, so people downstream just design their own partially-redundant forms to accomplish new functions they have.
Now, one instance of the form needs to be filled out. How much do you pay the person who enters data on the form? - Probably around $10 to $50 dollars per hour. If the form takes 10 minutes to complete, let’s say that on average you now have several dollars invested in the piece of paper. If they have to redundantly re-enter the same information on multiple forms, the cost further increases unnecessarily.
During a recent hospital visit, I had to redundantly re-enter the exact same information again and again. Their computers did NOT talk to other computers only 4-feet away! They even had to redo some of my blood tests (which they charged my insurance company for), BECAUSE they could not find the paperwork from the day before – HOW EXASPERATING! I left with a large hematoma (bruise) on my arm from the unnecessary redundant test.
Is it any wonder that the healthcare industry errors KILL a quarter million Americans every year? Most of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Candidate plans for greatly-improved American healthcare include some type of electronic enterprise systems integration, combined with Internet publication of care provider quality and price documentation. Some states (like Massachusetts) already mandate this TODAY.
Generally, a human has to receive the paper input forms, and enter it in a computer system. You can add another few dollars per page (including data entry clerks’ salary, training, supervision, coffee breaks, vacation, health insurance, cube, furniture, air conditioning, office space, computer, and someone to check their work and eventually correct their percentage of daily data-entry errors.
Some of the information (like address, etc.) is also needed in other computer systems (often more than a dozen in typical badly-mismanaged large corporations, and MANY more in governmental agencies). The paperwork way to distribute this information is to make copies and mail, distribute, or fax them to other stovepipe-isolated, autonomously-maintained redundant-data, disconnected, incompatible computing systems. Now, that one piece of paper has cost the enterprise a dozen-or-more times the original few dollars, and there are probably already several clerical data entry errors and information inconsistencies across the enterprise.
AND THEN, the person submits a Change Of Address form, and the paper MISmanagement process begins all over again. Most companies have MANY people who spend their entire career just shuffling paper. The laughable horror stories and pervasive anecdotes about corporate mismanaged paper processes are enough to fill many encyclopedic Dilbert-like cartoon websites.
Every CEO of every large enterprise needs to learn that EVERY sheet of paper is probably costing the organization (roughly) over $100. How many sheets do you see moving around each day? How full is your In Box? Eliminate the paper, eliminate unnecessary costs, AND accelerate the enterprise, while making it much-more productive and profitable.
If you are a business-as-usual person, who does not agree, then none of our material can help you.
It requires a CEO mandate to bring about the long-overdue elimination of unnecessary paperwork, and integrate ALL systems across an entire disorganized, paper-constrained enterprise.
Paper As Input Media
In the 1970’s, when corporate computers with online terminal displays began to appear, forward-thinking large organizations began to realize they could Greatly Accelerate Their Operations and Improve The Quality Of Their Interdepartmental Communications. They put information ONLINE and made it Immediately Available In Real Time, throughout their widespread, geographically-distributed enterprise.
After American Airlines created the (once innovative) Sabre Reservation Service in the 1960’s, they made MUCH MORE PROFIT selling Sabre Service than they ever have flying airplanes. Can you imagine the mess airlines would be in today, IF they used only paper to track seat assignments?
When Sabre assigns a seat on a flight, EVERYONE worldwide has instantaneous knowledge of this critical information. Ancient Sabre has long been the world’s largest and fastest commercial REAL TIME computing communication system. (Goggle has many more hits per second, but its Internet website information is NOT real time. Paperless search engines have very-high global social information distribution value, BUT their webcrawlers lag days or weeks behind real time.)
In 2007, innovative airlines are implementing the paperless boarding pass. You just download it to your cell phone and show your display to TSA or the airline’s gate agent. Many similar innovations are currently being planned by others.
The entire world of transportation would instantly screech to an instantaneous halt, if the 1960’s Sabre system technology had even a small hiccup. Its total reliability is quite unlike the extremely-buggy haystack code that comes out of the poorly-mismanaged children that run “small-scale software development” (like Microsoft). College dropout Bill Gates has often said: “People don’t buy quality. They buy features.” Windows Vista dramatically demonstrates Bill’s disdain for quality and reliability. Every new software release introduces many more bugs than were in any previous version – Many Vista users are now removing it from their computers. The Microsoft low-quality trend has never been corrected – It only gets worse.
The world of life-critical real-time computing system development has understood what it takes to produce ZERO-DEFECT COMPUTER SYSTEMS for MANY decades. The Bill Gates generation does NOT. It turns out that it can cost 80% less to develop ZERO DEFECT code than Microsoft-style buggy haystack code, SINCE Zero Defect code costs MUCH less to debug and maintain, and the cost/effort/resources to receive and deal with bug reports are NOT required for zero-defect code.
Some of the Top Secret paperless real-time command-and-control systems that Larry Hartweg has been responsible for have gone for two decades without even ONE runtime software defect. Zero defect code is NOT difficult to create – It is just VERY DIFFERENT from the small-scale thinking that Microsoft-like developers have force-fed the business world.
The 1970’s methodology mantra du jour became “ELIMINATE PAPER.” The unprecedented productivity improvements MORE THAN JUSTIFIED hundreds of billions of dollars worth of $10 million mainframe computers PLUS expensive broadband global digital communications networks BEFORE the days of the very-low-cost computers, satellites and the fiber optic broadband Internet that we have commonly available TODAY.
HOWEVER, MOST new millennium companies and poorly-mismanaged governmental agencies have STILL NOT applied this extremely-cost-effective computing-communication concept, three-and-a-half decades later ! Ineffective, inefficient, paper-based “business-as-usual” dominates society.
The very most you can expect for many anachronistic, declining, uncompetitive U.S. organizations is the inefficient, low-quality, 1970’s FAX machine, which DOUBLES expensive paperwork every time a copy is made, and recopied, until the later generations become totally illegible. What foolish IGNOREance of modern computing communication technology dominates corporate and governmental America today. Inefficient paper is turned into an electronic signal to be transmitted, and then a low-quality copy of the inefficient paper is created remotely.
In our new millennium, we have powerful high-speed computers with huge data storage that cost only a few hundred dollars. Broadband, worldwide, nearly-instantaneous communication across heterogeneous global networks costs only a few dollars a month, with NO incremental usage charge.
WHY IS IT THAT CORPORATIONS AND GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES STILL STRONGLY RESIST ELIMINATING PAPERWORK ? ? ? There is good reason why America is becoming less internationally competitive every single day, and the value of our dollar is declining, Paperwork and enterprise DISintegration are big parts of the problem.
