Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
control in narrow swaths of real estate, driven by system or organizational
boundaries.
Note that footnotes and fine print are formatting methods of presenting
the excluded information. They are not often used that way, however.
Footnotes are used for elaborations, clarifications, or qualifications of the
information delivered in the main body of a report. Fine print meets the
objective of presenting information in a way most likely to be ignored.
They can, of course, be used to address the issue of “what we do not
know.”
Portals and dashboards are attempts to bring data from multiple places
to one place for a more “useful” experience. For them to be more effective,
they need to incorporate the “not-knowing” principles.
Designing Information
Forms and Formality
The concept of formal information comes from the concept of forms.
Forms have been part of bureaucracies for ages. A successful manual
process was invariably built on a succession of well-designed forms that
moved the process along, doing what the information systems of today
are supposed to do well — providing the required information at the
right time to the right person. Even today in offices with considerable
automation, forms, many of them manually filled in, continue to be in
use, although many feed
automated systems.
Paperless offices and societies have not been attained. Paper continues
to be an efficient method of capturing information. It requires low setup
and support costs (a pen and a paper), allows cheaper scalable and
parallel processing (at a DMV office, for example, it is less expensive to
have many people fill in paper forms in parallel than to provide an entry
terminal for each person), and, in many cases, doubles as both an
application and a proof of application because of the formal signature on
it. Carbon copies can be retained by the applicant for his or her records.
Paper, however, is less efficient in getting it processed downstream. Data
entry can introduce errors and has a cost. Paper forms do not provide
the intelligence and validation that electronic forms can offer. However,
a system designer should consider paper forms as a valid design option.
They are not outdated. (Many Web sites still basically serve up forms
supplying them as downloads or screen forms.)
There are more graphics in Web-based applications but they appear
to be present more in the opening lead in screens. By the time forms-
based processing begins, Web-based workflows are a series of electronic
forms.
