Den 15.11.2018 14:39, skrev Bruce Walker:
"Paperless office". Pffft. :-)
LOL.
When a new pharmaceutical product is launched, the company has to apply
for market authorisation in USA, Canada, EU, Japan and China separately.
Or used to anyway... Not sure about the current status of cooperation
between the Asian countries.
The documentation requirements in Europe, Japan, Canada and USA made the
pharma industry _beg_ the authorities for an electronic alternative to
paper. I personally saw an application arrive by mail to the Norwegian
Agency as four metric tons of paper. In addition, Norwegian red tape
demanded that a separate copy be sent to the National Archive. It was
like half a freakin' rainforest! And all of it would have fit snugly on
to a DVD.
A big part of my job at the agency was to implement "paperless office".
Although we carefully avoided that term. We called it "electronic
handling". It worked out quite nicely in the mid-2000s, but as part of
that project I dug into the history of previous attempts and found
references to consultants from IBM trying to convince the Agency of an
imminent paperless future in 1991. During lunch one day one of the
well-seasoned secretaries had got wind of my poking around in what she
called "the old crap", and described the enthusiasm shown by the
consultants back in the day. She had been quite dazzled by them,
especially on the course sessions where the consultants laid out how
neatly everything would work in digital. She said it probably was why
she particularly remembered one elderly pharmacist commenting that the
paperless toilet would happen long before the paperless office.
It took me a while to find the documentation for that project by the
way. Eventually it had been archived with the label "X-files".
So I guess "the truth is out there" still. :-D
Jostein
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