The Senate Still Uses Typewriters?

Last week, NPR offered this report about the behind-the-times method for submitting campaign expenses in the US Senate.  According to the report, expenses are tracked on spreadsheets but when the time comes to submit, they are printed out, typed (with an actual typewriter!) onto a paper form, delivered to the Office of the Secretary of the Senate, scanned and emailed to the FEC. The FEC then prints them and a contractor manually enters the data into another spreadsheet.  All these steps between the first spreadsheet and the last cost the U.S. taxpayers an estimated $450,000 per year. 

It’s all waste.

This has been troubling me and I recently realized why.  I’ve seen this same kind of waste in other places.  The local government I worked with has hard copies of legal documents scanned and stored by multiple departments.  Electronic records are used in the doctor’s office, but paper lab reports (generated on a computer) are scanned to be added to the record.

They don’t all drop to the level of using a typewriter, but they certainly aren’t taking advantage of the available technology tools.

The question the NPR report raised was “Who is blocking the proposed change to this crazy process?”  I have a different question:  How much other waste is there?

In Lean terminology, “waste” is anything (cost, time, work) that doesn’t directly contribute to the desired outcome.  Waste in administrative processes can include:

• Waiting
• Rework – such as entering the same data multiple times
• Unnecessary process steps – such as moving information from one format to another
• Transport of documents
• Backlog of work

The number of administrative processes in the U.S. federal government is countless. Also, consider the 50 state governments and many more local or city governments.  I expect the $450,000 mentioned above is only the beginning. The opportunities for eliminating waste at all these levels of government must be worth millions of dollars.  Note that this isn’t about wasteful spending.  This is the cost of waste that is built in to the processes by which the government operates every day. 

This is where the real opportunity is for lean government practices.  Eliminate the administrative waste, and free that cost (in time and money) to better serve us, the taxpayers.

-by Cyndi Hernandez, Senior Manager