For weeks I've been avoiding it, but today (during lunch) I had to do the pre-insurance inspection of my car. The reason for pushing it back should be obvious for anyone that have gone through the procedure. Even if I'm used to catching up on my blog readings while waiting, it's a testing experience. My hopes didn't exactly go up when I arrived and was ordered back to the far end of the long line.

But, this time I was greatly surprised! Even if I had time for a few blogs, the wait was not close to what I had expected (about 30 minutes with five cars before mine). The inspector hardly looked at me (yes, he was an efficient guy), took the papers of my car, and got instantly busy. I was amazed how fast he worked, and when I saw that he was constantly tapping in everything that he saw and heard (from both the car and me), I asked what he was using. He showed me the device (a Qtek 9100 a k a HTC Wizard), and when I said "Ok, you got Windows in that" he instantly replied "Yes, it works great!". You can see the only photo I got (as I said, he was a busy man) on the right, and I'm sorry for the bad quality. But I can tell you that the application was very well designed and I was surprised that the UX had so much information (really small fonts were used to fit in as much info as possible). All the necessary photos of the car was captured with the built-in camera and there was no hassle what so ever for the inspector (he took the picture, tapped a few times, and took the next, and so on). He said that an inspection that took more than double the time before, created even more work afterwards (data entry, photo transfer, etc).

Apart from the great UX, I was really impressed by another thing - EVERYTHING ended up digitalized. The parts of the process that was governed by law (or the insurance company) to be on paper was rapidly filled in (hardly readable) and then he took a photo of the paper, and threw it in a large green bin with a yellow label saying "to archive" (it actually looked like a large recycle bin, which it probably what it should have been if the correct laws and directions were in place). After I had signed the final paper, he took a photo of it, threw it in the bin, shook my hand, and turned to the next in line. I was AMAZED! The inspector expected that from the point where the insurance company assigned them an inspection to the point where the completed inspection was approved by the insurance company was reduced by 80%. Still, he said that the largest benefit for him was that many irritating and stressing events (the person responsible for data entry coming back with questions, the need to start another inspection before one was completed due to wait for some manual step, etc) was gone.

To my point, and the title of this post. I have been involved in WM development for eight years, and I have seen many systems come alive. All have led to increased productivity and efficiency, and all have led to large cost cuts or even revenue and profit increase. But I haven't seen many examples of where the legacy process was completely replaced by a digitalized and mobile process. Often many manual steps remain for various reasons (mostly legal or related to company policy), and often it is those steps that reduce the possible gains drastically. The post title is a reference to a British movie about going all the way, and my lesson again today, and hopefully yours too: We need to go all the way in making processes (mostly papers) digital (yes, everything that Bill Gates wrote is true), and that is many times more important when designing mobile solutions. The inspector I met today was doing his work in the "current moment" or "now" by performing what I call "JitBiz" ("Just-in-time Business", referencing both managed compilers as well as the old idea by Henry Ford not to keep any stock), and by doing that he was also relived of "worry" (for things that was waiting for him) and "regret" (for things that needed follow-up). This is the way all companies should work for the sacred trinity; the customer, the business, and the (holy) employee.