How "e" is the place you work?

2 years since the height of the "e" craze, how "e" is the place you work for? how paperless? how much is the level of integration between all functions? how integrated are the flow of information ? etc etc.

Kumbakarna
Friday, December 12, 2003

My place accepts resignations via e-mail :)

rml
Friday, December 12, 2003

My workplace is very traditional and anti-e. People here print everything. Everything needs to be on paper or else it does not exist.

Patrik
Friday, December 12, 2003

eZ like Sunday morning!

Tapiwa
Friday, December 12, 2003

Pretty good - although without the jargon fortunately. 

The only problem is the space between chair and screen.  Example - staff member raved that her system had destroyed all of her old e-mail, it was terrible , it must be scrapped.  The problem - outlook was switched to view "last 7 days".

A cynic writes
Friday, December 12, 2003

After the mid-90s, most companies (or their lawyers), ensured we will never be paperless.  The past few companies I have consulted with, have an enforced "email will be deleted after x days" policy.  The thought, I was told, is this will avoid any embarrassing emails from showing up five years from now.

What has happened instead is most people print those and file them.    Now there are hundreds of printed paper copies.  Even worse (or better), they are easy to transfer off-site for permanent retrieval.

MSHack
Friday, December 12, 2003

The email will be deleted after x days policy is a mess when it comes to labour law. How do I prove I was told to do something by my boss. How can he prove he told me to do something?

Thank God for the pen drive.

And how on earth do you keep customer records?

Stephen Jones
Friday, December 12, 2003

There's 6 of us, and we all work from home 4 days a week.

Pretty e.

Although, truth told, to do bug scrubs every Monday, we end up printing out the list of new bugs. Something about not owning a projector...

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Friday, December 12, 2003

I'll put it to you this way: Most of the managers here come from the Cobol Mainframe world - not too techie!!!!! (Most of the COBOL types here are clueless on Windows, Client Server & Web Architecture).

My boss constantly prints out & photocopies emails then proceeds to distribute them by hand to his team instead of just forwarding the emails to us.

He also refuses to use an Outlook Calendar!!!! He keeps a literal calendar on his desk with important dates and vacation requests.

GenX'er
Friday, December 12, 2003

Everything is very "e" in my place. My departement is called eSolutions, people are eConsultants, etc.. the usual pre dotcom crash jargon is everywere. Even my company logo is a big "e".

But nothing is integrated and nothing is paperless. I'm still required to send my time sheets via fax...

Pathetic.

eRnest
Friday, December 12, 2003

We actually are implementing a project to scan all of our documents and we're then going to trash the paper copies of things we don't need.  The only things that stay on paper are contracts and documents required by the government.

Day to day, we don't print all that much, having mutiple monitors helps - people can bring up a contract, a specification, and a supplier listing at the same time and reference them on screen. 

I think the biggest problem is going to be efficient OCR and storage/arrangement/naming of the scanned documents.  Thus far we've managed fairly well but as business continues to grow it will become difficult.  And we're running into some problems with versioning that we're going to have to address soon (we're actually investigating Subversion as a document management solution based on the way it stores diffs).

e is short for printEveryting
Friday, December 12, 2003

Actually, I print out loads of stuff, but make a point of throwing it away afterwards, even if I will have to print it out again in a couple of days.

Paper should be for immediate use; for long term storage and retrieval the personal computer is way ahead of anything else.

Stephen Jones
Friday, December 12, 2003

> for long term storage and retrieval the personal computer is way ahead of anything else. <

Yes... Thank G-d that the computers exist, or else we might never have discovered the Dead Sea Floppies.

www.MarkTAW.com
Friday, December 12, 2003

... And who can forget the Rosetta Hard Drive, and all the ancient Egyptian Laptops we were able to decode with it. Who would have thought that Tutenkamen invented Linux.

www.MarkTAW.com
Friday, December 12, 2003

Dear Mark,
                You're being flippant. If you had worked in a large organization before computers came along, when everything was stored in box files, you would know what I mean.

Stephen Jones
Friday, December 12, 2003

Stephen, I agree with you about the difficulties presented by boxes of files.  During college I had a temporary job for a few weeks which involved wading through hundreds of boxes for a large company searching for documents related to a particular product.  It took eight people four weeks, we didn't get all of it, and we probably paid the document storage company a few hundred dollars for transportation and unscheduled deliveries/pickups.  And this was a common thing to do at this company - yikes!

Lou
Friday, December 12, 2003

We recently build a giant, suspended metal-grate faux floor over 1/3 of our warehouse so that we would have more room to store all our boxes and boxes and boxes of paperwork...I'm pretty sure we will NEVER be paperless unless there's a fire.

Then, we'll make more once the mess is cleaned up.

Tim Lara
Friday, December 12, 2003

eRnest,
>Even my company logo is a big "e".

Enron is it? :-) They made an effort to go paperless :-)

Patrik
Friday, December 12, 2003

We're totally e...  no paper shuffling around at all. 

Almost Anonymous
Friday, December 12, 2003

It's very 'e'.  Very, very 'e'.  Friendly to the 420, too. 

Dance dance dance talk touch dance
Friday, December 12, 2003

Our company's workstations do not support this button.  All our output must judiciously avoid words that contain this glyph.  I must say that this is a most infuriating constraint.

Alyosha`
Friday, December 12, 2003

I work for a 500 people organization that is trying to be paperless but we are trapped in paperness. All data collected in the field is in paper and then transferred to databases, but the originals are archived. I can apply for leave filling a form in the intranet, but I need to print it to get some signatures. My salary is deposited in my bank account, but I get a letter saying that it went in. You get the idea: electronic duplication.

uncronopio
Friday, December 12, 2003

Unfortunately, there's a lot of needless paperwork where I work. Everything needs a form. Paper, signatures... jeez.

Shodan
Friday, December 12, 2003

I have a lot of e-tards that I work with :)

marcus
Friday, December 12, 2003

Pretty 'e'.

. We have VPN access from home.
. Working from home is not discouraged.
. Management knows you're working hard by your output - not by seeing your face in meetings.  That has to count for something - e or not.

hoser
Saturday, December 13, 2003

Though I really don't like working in Services Company, I must admit that my company is pretty 'e'.

We can do EVERYTHING from Intranet.

- Apply leave. Manager can approve from his desk.
- Salary is credited to bank account and I just get salary slip as PDF file.
- Loan can be applied using intranet. If it is below certain amount, the amount will be directly deposited to your bank account.
- My request to facilities, computers department is electronic.
- My work time sheet is maintained using software developed in house.
- 90% of Appraisal is done online! {remaining 10% in face to face meeting!}

We take print outs only for reading documents/emails.
This is one of the few things I like about my company!

JD
http://jdk.phpkid.org

JD
Sunday, December 14, 2003

Sounds like Wells Fargo.

hoser
Sunday, December 14, 2003

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