Back in the days before the PC if a business didn't have a mainframe (most of them) there would be well established manual procedures for handling documents. In particular there would be trained secretaries and filing clerks. Part of starting a new job would be to learn what the procedures were to follow. For instance when I started in the lab I'd be shown how case files were started at reception, why we used duplicate lab notebooks with the top copies going into the case files and case files and typed up reports going back to reception to be filed.
We now have a situation where "the computer" is expected to take over a lot of that handling. But the business-wide manual procedures haven't been replaced by ones suitable for the new environment. Part of the problem might be that a lot of what the secretarial or clerical staff did has fallen to those who those staff used to support. Part of it might be that older secretarial staff who were trained in a pre-PC world haven't been retrained or that training hasn't kept pace with IT facilities. Part may be that such practices as are in place are heavily influenced by the days of stand-alone PCs. And a huge chunk of it is that "the computer" simply doesn't do that job on its own.
It should be up to the business as a whole to decide and tell new staff "how we do things here". Obviously it's going to involve IT to ensure that what users are instructed to do works with backup procedures etc. That's part of the deciding by the business as a whole; IT is part of the whole business (What? You've outsourced it? Now you really have a problem because a big IT-shaped part of your business is missing.). But because it's how we, the business, do things it's not IT telling people what to do.
The deciding is going to have to involve senior people, those who traditionally had the support of the secretarial staff because the "we" in "how we do things here" is going to have to include them. The VP and the legal secretary of earlier comments who kept stuff on their desktops would previously have had somebody else to do their filing; now they have to use whatever's provided to do it themselves.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
