Focus on the grievance

Look at these staff officers about to deploy on D Day - still using the same analog processes we use today

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The grievance is simple: We live in 2021, but our office is in 1998. Why am I using Excel spreadsheets to capture data? Why are we sending information by email to each individual person? Why are staff officers chasing information for weeks for a PowerPoint that is out of date once the data is inputted? Why do most soldiers not have access to any information? This is what people have been doing for 80 years. Why do the staff and clerks have to go to the data - why can't the data come to them?

How do we save 1,000,000+ labor hours for the Canadian Armed Forces? That would roughly be 500 staff officers, clerks and operations staff that are crushing paperwork. Feeding the beast? Refining excel spreadsheets? Making new spreadsheets? I shutter at the thought of initial reporting for the pandemic. Did every manager have to call all their subordinates to ask if they had COVID19...and they had to tell the unit operations staff by email...who had to put it in an excel spreadsheet...and send it to the higher operations center...and put it into a bigger excel spreadsheet...that was wrong and had to be started all over again?!

There are new ways to automate work. How do you track where everyone is at the moment? Some might be on a task, some might be on an exercise and some might be on a deployment? The visualization below should link them all together. (dummy data obviously)

There are new ways to automate work. How do you track when people are arriving at a task or unit? The visualization below will link them all together. (dummy data obviously)

If you are spending your day looking for data, inputting that data into something, sending it to someone else and then reacting off a new request - start asking yourself - why am I doing this? There must be a better way. The Digital Insurgency Grievance on Week One is, why am I doing it this way? I don't do have to be a World War 2 staff officer. Let's make the computer do it for us. Get the data to come to us!

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