This past weekend, I had to accompany a relative to the emergency room of my local hospital. She had been feeling poorly and the doctor on call (hers was off for the weekend) suggested she needed to get checked out and get a blood test.
When we arrived, the check-in area had her complete some forms and entered her into the system. She has been to the hospital before, so her medical and insurance information was already there. Then we sat and waited; actually it wasn’t very long.
We went into the triage area where a nurse took her vitals, asked her what was wrong and copied down everything about her medications; she brought all the prescription bottles to make this easier. The nurse wrote some of this down on a form and entered some of it into the computer. After that, we went out to the waiting room and waited.
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Everyone from Walmart to my 10 year old nephew is using cloud computing. Small and mid-sized businesses see it as a great way to use the types of services that were only available to large organizations in the past. Large companies see it as a way to scale quickly and provide new services fast. My business runs completely in the cloud. Ten years ago this would have been impossible.
Businesses are taking advantage of filing sharing services from Onehub, DropBox, Egnyte, Box and others to share documents across PCs, Macs, smart phones and tablets. Evernote is a great service for sharing meeting notes and documents with colleagues. Numerous other services exist for collaborating with customers, business partners, development teams and anyone who needs access to information quickly and from any device. The cloud has become a big virtual file cabinet for most of us.
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After you get married, you may want to change your last name. Some people take their spouse’s last name and some combine last names with a hyphen; I even know some people who picked a completely different name. Get ready for a tedious process that is still using paper and old fashioned shoe leather (walking around).
You’ll need to notify various government agencies, financial institutions and service companies of your name change. Regardless of where you live, every country and state or province has similar procedures. The same basics apply to all of them.
You can pay for a name-change kit or you can do it yourself. Some places require you to file documents in-person, while others will let you change it over the phone, online or by letter. Find out what the protocol is for each place on your list, as the rules and documents required may vary. The common factor is that you will be completing a lot of forms and getting a lot of documentation.
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About a year ago I wrote a blog post about dumb excuses for using paper documents. In the last 12 months things haven’t changed a lot, although I am happy to see some organizations are moving in the right direction.
The Baltimore Ravens and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers moved their playbooks to Apple iPads last season and more NFL teams announced plans to do the same this year. Some of these playbooks can be 800 pages. Try lugging that much paper around with you wherever you go.
More organizations are thinking of getting rid of paper documents in favor of accessing the information on iPads or other mobile devices. Alaska Airlines and American Airlines replaced their flight manuals with iPads. Other organizations are thinking about doing this too. If pilots are using iPads, then they should be able to sign off on flight readiness electronically rather than using paper and pen. That would speed up flight checks and hopefully get planes on their way faster. Wouldn’t that be nice?
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The phones are coming, the tablets are coming! What can we do? Our network is being overrun and there’s nothing we can do about it. When will the insanity stop?????
You may be getting this feeling as more people bring smart phones and tablets to work. What was once a citadel of security and order has now become a free for all as new devices emerge everyday and threaten the nice controlled world of IT. What has become a nightmare for some companies has become an opportunity to quickly innovate for others.
The movement of BYOD (bring your own device) to work has now reached the US Federal Government. In January 2012, Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel announced the launch of a mobile road map for the federal government. “We have a real opportunity to bring to bear mobile technology in federal government that changes the paradigm,” VanRoekel said. “The mobile strategy is a multipronged approach that is aimed at driving efficiency across the federal government, enhancing citizen-government interactions, and untethering federal employees from their desks.”
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