Data Entry: Woot Woot

Another one of the "important" aspects of working in a Congressman's office is data entry. Every piece of information that passes through the Congressman's office must be processed into Intranet Quorum(IQ). I know that Devon has just written a blog about how it works so I will not bore anyone with a second detailing of the process. However, I do find that this system, like the office itself has kinks that need to be worked out, but are hard to pinpoint. For instance, if an intern goes into IQ to enter the contact information for an individual that has come into the office for a meeting, said intern searches for their name already in the system. The problem comes when IQ presents the intern with 20 different "John Doe" search results. After comparing other information the intern may find that they have narrowed down their search to only a few of the possible suggestions. Now every intern is faced with a decision. Since they found no exact matches but close ones, do they update one of the existing close matches or do they create an entirely new folder? Both options have their pros and cons, but the most important issue comes from the data collection side. The whole purpose of IQ is to track what the Congressman's office has done for an individual and if that same person gets entered in 5 different times, then the effectiveness of the process has been ruined.
A part of this data entry, we as interns were in charge of recording support for HR 1351, a bill to save the USPS without using a dime of taxpayer money. Now this to me seems like an actually good use of IQ as a method for informing others as well as the Congressman about the goings-on of his constituents. The goal, or at least ideal goal, of a member of the House of Representatives should be to refine and enlarge the opinions of their constituents. This process becomes difficult if the Congressman is unaware of what those opinions are. Thus, even though time consuming and quite boring, I at least felt like some benefit came out of recording opinions on HR-1351.