Computers in the Workplace

   

     One of the interesting domains I worked in was state government hunting and fishing licensing. The company I worked for was owned by a bank, and the bank owner would say, "I don't get why this is hard. Someone comes in, gives someone money, we give them a license." In our most complicated system, the license sales were configured for distribution to the state accounting system. Meaning a specified amount or percentage of each sale was credited to various accounts based on how state staff configured the sale. Because they desired to have all of a hunter's data, it also involved importing millions of rows of information to build the historical licensing information. Websites were developed for online sales and administration of the system. Additionally, point-of-sale terminal sales systems were created for sales in Walmart and licensed stores throughout the state. A thermal printer was attached to printout on special paper that was designed to prevent fake licenses from being printed out on home printers.
    

    We had several state clients, and each state had completely different requirements. In one case, the hunting and fishing departments were separate clients who were squabbling over priority on the websites for whose products should be more prominently displayed. Hunting lotteries for deer licenses were a hot item, with the algorithm for determining the award of licensing modified to bias hunters who had entered the lottery the longest and failed to win a deer permit. Fishing permits were also incredibly complicated, with some licenses in a fixed amount held by families and having to be passed on if the boat or business were sold.

    When I left the industry, there was an ask from the state clients for applications that enforcement agents could have on them to validate licensing in the field. The opportunity for an app that carries a digital license would definitely be a great addition to the field. A big challenge in the fieldwork is cellular coverage in the remote areas preferred for hunting and fishing. As this network expands, the features of the phone apps could become richer.

    Computer literacy is definitely an issue in this domain. On one hand, you have hunters who are your customers and are typically not technologically literate. So, systems need to be user-friendly and fault-tolerant while still accommodating the complexity of the state laws around the licensing. The next echelon is the sales community at various outlets, which have to provide the licenses and help to the customers. Due to the fact our tools were delivered everywhere, from Walmart to mom-and-pop convenience stores, again, keeping things simple was a prerequisite. 

    Our other user group is the team at the state government offices. The company I was working for had several challenges related to technical literacy. Finding the person in the state government office with consistent, correct answers was a challenge, as was identifying how processes actually worked. Eighty percent of a task is easy to identify, we were often faulted for not providing the remaining 20 percent they were not thinking about, and we were not aware of to ask. One of our contracts had a provision for liquidated damages, where the state could recoup some of its expenses if the downtime hit certain metrics. This team was notorious for changing their minds and only approving subsets of completed work. Trying to ferret out the approved pieces in order to deliver just those pieces often ended up in bugs and of course, liquidated damages. There seemed a perverse pleasure in that state to cause this type of problem.   On another project, Hunt and Fish are two different departments that split costs to buy the same sales system. Who gets priority on the page? Left vs right? Top vs bottom, the requirements from our two "customers" in that state often came down to managing egos and finding ways to compromise.

Because we had an excellent technical team, we would identify coachable employees in the state team. By working with them, we were able to explain how the systems needed to work and how to help us model processes and test deliverables. We also worked with their administrative teams to make the back-office administration tools to configure license sales and accounting to be straightforward. 

For the devices in the "wild" with poor connectivity, at the time, there were no good solutions. Unfortunately, you cannot provide an entire sales history on the mobile app, so the agents could work disconnected. As mobile support is spreading, this will, of course, improve. Elon Musk's satellite internet, Starlink, may be a great solution in this space if it gets better coverage.