Viktor Gulidov, a mobilized Product Manager currently serving in a separate assault regiment, claims that a significant part of the paperwork in the Armed Forces of Ukraine can be automated, and thousands of military clerks can be involved in other tasks.
Viktor Gulidov, a mobilized Product Manager currently serving in a separate assault regiment, claims that a significant part of the paperwork in the Armed Forces of Ukraine can be automated, and thousands of military clerks can be involved in other tasks.
According to the specialist, instead of using product and technical competencies, he is engaged in maintaining a large amount of paper documentation and spreadsheets.
The author says that he works with dozens of journals and documents every day, which are repeatedly duplicated between different levels of management. In his opinion, a significant part of these processes can be transferred to a digital format. «I and thousands of other clerks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine can be replaced by the cloud and a high-quality task manager, which will reduce the time for completing orders by dozens of times and reduce the amount of routine work and errors,» Gulidov writes in a blog on DOU.
Among the main problems of the army, he highlights:
According to the author, the main problem lies not only in paper document flow, but also in the use of the competencies of mobilized specialists. «One of the key problems of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is the lack of mechanisms for the correct use of existing competencies,» he notes.
Gulidov compares the army’s approach to modern IT companies, where they try to recruit specialists based on their skills. He also writes that in some units, the military is already independently implementing digital tools for task management, but such practices have not yet become systemic.
At the same time, he emphasizes that he is not calling for layoffs. On the contrary, in his opinion, automation would free military personnel from routine work and involve them in tasks where their skills will be of greater benefit to the army.
The author also points out that digitalization is already happening, but mostly locally. If an IT specialist comes to a department, he often independently creates automation tools for his team. However, such solutions are rarely scaled to the level of the entire system.
According to Gulidov, modern cloud services, electronic document management, and task management systems could significantly reduce the time it takes to process orders, minimize the number of human errors, and use people in the military more effectively.
