Devil's Advocate: A new 'soft' technology

Given the limitations of data storage and retrieval, Martin Brampton tries out a new way of organising his life with a rather old technology - paper.

Jobcentre benefits staff have discovered a new way to keep records about their clients. They are writing things down on paper. Perhaps they got the idea by looking around typical office desks, which are covered with the stuff.

Demand for lowly paid filing clerks will mushroom, and that will lead to moves to outsource work to locations where labour is cheap. Shipping the paper across the world will reduce the clutter but might make retrieval times rather long.

Certainly, my desk is covered with paper, in a number of overlapping piles. Much of it is computer-produced. It is odd that anybody ever talked about paperless offices. Especially as a lot of the talk came from within Xerox, best known for its ability to take one piece of paper and turn it into lots of others at the press of a button.

It is a mystery what all the paper on my desk is doing. There seems to be too much of it for me to read all of it very often, if at all. In fact, I suspect that it is similar to the data that is stored in online storage systems. Most people think that around half of all stored data will never be accessed again. The only problem is that they don't know which half.

That creates an issue for the Jobcentre people. Information stored on disk drives is at least out of sight. We may be in a situation where it is cheaper to go on storing it than to figure out what to delete. But it is out of the way, unlike the clutter on my desk. Sooner or later, the Jobcentre people are going to have to figure out what to do with the bits of paper they are writing things down on.

That may lead to the reinvention of more advanced systems for handling bits of paper, once known as filing systems. Demand for lowly paid filing clerks will mushroom, and that will lead to moves to outsource work to locations where labour is cheap. Shipping the paper across the world will reduce the clutter but might make retrieval times rather long.

Recently I have invested in another piece of technology in this struggle to keep information under control - a stock of shorthand notebooks. They work rather like a to-do list. I write down the things I ought to do as they occur to me, or as people remind me. Then, when I have done them, I tick them off. When everything on a page is ticked off, the page is torn out. It really works quite well, and can be carried much more easily than a laptop computer.

There is a problem. Some tasks seem to move very slowly, if at all. So there are still some pages left in the shorthand notebook weeks after they were written. In my experience, the best solution is to keep looking at them for a little while longer, then put them in a drawer and forget about them. It gets over the problem that besets data on disk, because the books that are never accessed finish up at the bottom of the pile. It is then safe to throw them away.

I think this provides a test for software systems. Before embarking on the perilous task of creating a new piece of software, it is worth considering whether the problem could be solved by the use of a shorthand notebook. It is surprising how widely applicable a solution it can be, when you put your mind to it.

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said of the Jobcentre problem: "We are putting processes in place to ensure that customers are not adversely affected by delays." I expect that means he has ordered some shorthand notebooks.