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…and If Elected

By DANIEL ANTION posted 05-02-2012 07:15

  

Now that, according to most news sources, the presidential election has begun, I think it’s appropriate for me to treat a recent news story in a special way. By that I mean that I feel comfortable stringing together what may be unrelated facts in a way that supports my position.  The story I am talking about was published in February in the Hartford Business Journal under the headline “Idle Enfield envelope plant to house documents.”A quick read of the article tells the sad story of how the nearby town will see a facility converted from a manufacturing plant that once employed over 130 people to a records storage facility employing “a handful of workers”. Sadder still, if I put my campaign hat on is the fact that the facility will be storing documents that were born digital.

Yeah, I know, it doesn’t say that in the article, but think about it. They stopped making envelopes at this facility in 2009. One could surmise that the demand for envelopes had diminished, probably due to the rise of email and other electronic delivery options. Despite the drop in delivery of physical documents, the company that is converting the facility describes this as part of “a national expansion” to serve their “growing business.” Those statements are more than enough evidence that we are talking about digital documents that have been printed and are now being trucked to Enfield, CT to be stored in a “multi-million-dollar” facility. Oh the humanity!

I’m not running for office, but if I were, keeping documents that were born digital in digital form would be a campaign plank. I would appeal to the environmentalists, the millennials, and the people who exercise good old common sense when voting – OK, that last group won’t add many votes. I guess I would lose, because Enfield would have an empty building, a handful of workers would remain unemployed, a bunch of truck drivers would have less freight to haul and demand for oil would go down. OK, I’ll stay off the campaign trail, but I am proud to announce that I am taking up this battle; in fact, I might have a victory to report.

We are about to rewrite the process by which we request checks for vendors who still send us invoices. The new process is going to reside in SharePoint. Invoices that are received electronically will be stored with the request electronically and people who receive invoices in envelopes will be allowed to scan them and attach them to the request. I would have preferred “allowed” to be “required” but I saw “A Bridge Too Far” so I know the danger of being overly aggressive. The result of our operation will be the elimination of a few hundred pieces of paper stemming from a born digital source and landing in a filing cabinet, unless the accountant prints a copy for her records.



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