Often we find users who are either looking to use itcons as a way to provide business intelligence, knowledge for their companies and sometimes with users who are looking for a way to record or control evidence of work actually done.
Neither approach is mutually exclusive. In fact, most of the time it is possible to achieve both objectives, but we do think it is important to know which approach is more important, since, depending on this prevalence, when deciding between better or greater usability for the end user, understood as requesting the strictly necessary data, or a greater recording of evidence, for example, we will have to be clear about our purpose.
This reflection comes from a small configuration we did last week for a company in the construction sector that is dedicated to road maintenance. The work report or production report that they fill out records all the tasks they perform throughout the day. It records the road in question, the kilometer point, the typical task performed, some observations in the form of an open field and even the vehicle used.
When we asked the reason for such rigorous control, the response of the person in charge was very clear and concise:
If in 10 years' time a sign we put up falls down and causes an accident, we cannot afford not to have access to the information about what happened on that day and have as much information as possible.
But while this statement makes clear the need to record and safeguard the work reports in a rigorous way, this is not an obstacle to also provide business information, since all the tasks typed and sequenced throughout the day (currently digitized by hand from a work report on paper) serves to feed an operating system that allows the company to know in a very detailed way the productivity of their work.
In short, as they say colloquially in the middle ground is the virtue in this case in the ability to record everything I need to keep as evidence of the work done and that in turn the recorded data serve to process them and generate business intelligence.