Maybe more of a rant. I work as an archaeologist for a private company, and my work generally consists of testing prospective telecommunications towers for artifacts or historically significant buildings. The primary way we do this is through shovel tests and photographs.
A few months ago, we tested out this new app, Fulcrum. We were in a large number of projects in a Kentucky city, with a lot of historic properties, so Fulcrum was supposed to help keep the projects organized around which properties were in which view shed. I was already noticing that the app required four three button presses to take a picture, as opposed to our field cameras which were two, including pressing the button to turn it on. But filling out the shovel tests was the real killer. Normally we fill it out on paper shovel test forms, quick pencil notations and we're done. On Fulcrum, we had to type them out, which is much slower than scribbling with our pencils. I was like, fine, maybe it's useful for a big project like this, we'll see how it works for a more traditional survey.
I've been on two surveys with the app, and learned so much more about its drawbacks. It takes like two times longer to record a shovel test, the camera is slow and low res (couldn't read street signs or house numbers in the resulting photos), and if you haven't set up the project properly in the app you might not be able to record shovel tests or historic properties, and I had to use the field camera or my phone anyway.
The draw of this app is supposed to frontload the survey report organization to the field, and people in the office can access the shovel test data or photographs immediately. But, newsflash, the field sucks. I'm using my personal phone with fingers covered in sweat, silt, loam, clay, and sand, it can be boiling hot or freezing cold, and extra time in the field can mean exposing you and your crew to increased hazardous conditions.
I pointed all of these issues out to my boss during a Monday meeting, but he drowned me out by raising his voice, not quite yelling, but firmly putting his foot down that we'll be using the app going forward.
With previous companies I've worked with, the field lead would just take time out after the fieldwork to upload shovel test data and photos to the company shared server. I'm just going to start doing this, and ask what the mechanical difference is. I just feel like it's a “productivity toy”, one of these fads that is supposed to boost productivity by like 15% or so. But I have evidence that it is making everything significantly less efficient, but he's sticking to his guns cause they've invested so much money on accounts with this app, and time in training people how to use it.