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The Quantas posting is useful and I suggest serves to point out the
increasing futility in trying to maintain a system of printed policies or
procedures with update pages, lists of current pages, distribution lists,
etc., etc.
Clearly the future looks like switching to electronic delivery via palm
pilots or whatever works.
Policies at my company are intranet based (and in HTML), and readers are
cautioned against printing them with language at the beginning stating
"IMPORTANT NOTICE: A printed copy of this document may not be the document
currently in effect. The official version is located on the Sandia
Restricted Network (SRN) and watermark-controlled." "SRN" is our local
jargon for "intranet-firewall protected." "Watermark-controlled" refers to
a body-background graphic, and this technique only works in our environment
where Netscape is our official browser--background graphics are indeed
printable with IE, but they don't print using Netscape.
I'd like to see study results where it's been determined paper must continue
for this sort of thing. Probably the pilot or co-pilot reading his or her
checklist could be a problem, but hey, planes have lots of radios already
and some sort of display screen could surely receive the most recently
updated checklist from the master server. (How about that phrase--master
server?)
