Am.Not.So.Wise

I went to see a demo recently. I was surprised to have met someone I knew from Asta System. If fact there is a story behind my encounter with that gentlemen. I published an article in ASP101 some years ago about paperless solution. That gentlement read that article and emailed me so I said ‘hey we are in the same little city, let’s meet’. Then we came out for a chat and his company sells paperless solution.

To be honest the demo I saw the other day isn’t too impressive. I just said to myself ‘I could write that too, just give me couple of years….’. Of course I couldn’t possibly be capable of producing a commercial product like that, still it wasn’t that attractive at first glance. I think it’s about 3-4 years behind.

There is another firm here in Hong Kong called Axisoft who is providing paperless solution to a few government departments here. I wish I could have a look one day.

Got this comment about my quest for paperless office.

Have briefly looked at this iKE office which is like another one I know called springCM. Web 2.0 is about “software as service” as both of them are not new in this market they are doing exactly the right thing for a long time. Many other similar products requiring users to buy software in a box for installation on client’s server are completely out of date.

I just wonder if there are ads supported opensourced solution available. What exactly is that? Well say you have designed a paperless solution, e.g. using LAMP which are all free, then distribute it freely to whoever wants it. How do you get rewarded? To do that you could add in the user interface with text ads similar to what Gmail does to your email, i.e. peeks into indexed text of the stored document and offer text ads. Of course that intranet based paperless solution stops working if an Internet connection is broken, i.e. relevant text ads is always available to the user interface.

Has anyone out there thought of that? Hey Google will you consider that? Paperless solution is something good to go with GDrive.

I can’t trace it now but it must have been sometime in November 2003 because I wrote to the editor of the HKIE Magazine Hong Kong Engineer back in November 2003, I said

HKSAR published the captioned strategy in 98, updated it on 2001 and have recently published consultation paper inviting public comments (web link available in my article attached). HK is in fact doing not bad, according to a survey by Accenture (ranked 7th among other governments)

Being a member of the engineering community I personally have not seen too many changes affecting the way we conduct our business. OK, you may say we can tender using electronic delivery but I doubted any contractor has done it, especially for large contract which required voluminous submission. During performance there is nothing specified in trying to utilize the IT investment the SAR has put in (total of $3,868 million according to the survey just for 2000-2002). The mindset has not been changed over the years.

I once worked in consulting practice, my ex-colleagues told me recently that submission of study report is still specified to be in paper (at least 25-30 copies) to various departments. What’s wrong with CDRom?

The attached article described a personnel experience, my low cost attempt. I was writing under the same title, for a ASP programmer website, something similar of much longer length (with code snapshots, screen capture etc), hence trimming down to about 1,500 words was easy.

The public consultation ends in December. Let me know if you would consider publishing this one.