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Neil Williams wrote: > > There simply isn't time to send company data to and from a central > server with a national company when each of 800 branches is making > 3,000 transactions a day. Broadband simply cannot cope. The corollary being the Google search engine can't possibly exist ;) Bah 10 transactions a second (assuming an 8 hour day), one might have to use more than one disk drive at a time but it isn't exactly demanding by modern standards. > Some documents *have* to be printed for tax and audit reasons This is far less than you might expect. Speaking as someone who worked for an organisations with a legal requirement that key documents had to be kept for 100 years. > Not true. The paperless office is a mindset that has already been > dumped in all practical terms. Don't flog a dead horse. You've never been to SUN Microsystems have you. Not paperless, but close to, I believe Microsoft is similar. >> Consider XML - computer to computer communication that should be human >> readable? Thats oxyMoronic! > > Nothing wrong with XML. It's more readable than RTF or CSV. Hehe, this is a debate that has been had with more insight elsewhere. When I was at the Met. Office their was a big debate on how code forms should work, as digital code forms replaced code forms designed for teletypes. Human readable formats have big advantages, and these days when CPU is incredibly cheap it may make more sense to store, and transmit, data in human readable formats (or compressed versions of such). > But that DB cannot be accepted by external auditors so the data within > it has to be reformatted into an officially acceptable format and it is > THIS format that forms the basis of the data persistence requirements > of the company, NOT the database. Databases, by definition, are > continually changing. Audit requires that snapshots are preserved for > indefinite periods in a recognisably original form. I've never seen big company audits done from anything but computer based reports. I know some of the big organisation I've worked for had hard copy of some financial transactions, but when you get into big numbers of largely automated transactions it would be impossible to audit the data in its entirety without using computers. All one can do is pick specific transactions and establish the electronic trail is consistent with other electronic trails. >> The M$ approach is basically - never organise and we'll keep selling you more >> and more powerfull versions of software to not organise on. > > True. I don't think that is M$, M$ are highly organised for a company of their size. Their customers might take that approach. >> 25 years ago I could write programs with hundreds of thousands of variables >> and see when each one was used or modified. The average office cant even tell >> who has seen one of a couple of hundred documents and done anything about it. >> Thats M$ for you - I have a computer on my desk thats 3000 times more powerful >> than one from 25 years ago and I cant use it to do anything I couldn't do 25 >> years ago when it comes to documents - apart from make them 'prettier'. >> And FLOSS is blindly following. > > Not true. Just because the Office software is similar, does not mean > there aren't tools that can convert that data into other forms. The > problem is that these are other transient forms, it doesn't solve the > problem of long term persistence - for that we still need officially > recognisable printed documents, human readable. Depends what problem you are solving, if it is document management, I tend to agree with Tom, few companies have used their tools effectively. But I've worked with IT managers who knew what they were doing as managers of information, and deployed their systems, and some of them even used Word (okay they used it as a tool for printing letters from databases). Getting organised and the tools one uses to do it are almost orthogonal I suspect. Much like one can write Fortran66 in any language, one can make any system disorganised. You seem to be obsessing on audit, which is quite a small area for a lot of systems. > I receive payments from my clients automatically but the officially > recognised audit trail involves a paper-based confirmation that matches > the entry on the bank statement. That confirmation now comes as a PDF > but I still have to read that PDF and enter the data by hand. My client > formats for humans as their last stage but their human readable format > is my INCOMING data so the first stage of MY processing is to convert > the human readable form to a digital form (GnuCash). For audit reasons, > the confirmation MUST come in a printable form that can be > authenticated by being of a recognised presentation. If I convert that > PDF to HTML, it will not display precisely as the PDF and will not be > accepted - the conversion could have altered the data. Your paper auditing trail is bigger than many big corporations, who receive, and send money entirely by electronic transfer. Indeed some of these companies demand supplier use such methods before doing business with them. As such the invoice, the payment, and the receipt are all electronic, and if a paper trail exists at all, it is probably somewhere in a very, very, long printout in a safe a long way away from the human auditors.
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