No Number Before the Envelope

A Design Science Study of a Correspondence Register for a Small Licensing Office

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Continuous Improvement reports a design science study in which a web-based register replaced the bound letter-books of a four-person groundwater licensing office over eighteen months. Moving the allocation of an outgoing letter's reference number from drafting to printing for signature, and requiring every unsent number to carry a reason, reduced void numbers from 8.1 to 1.3 per hundred issued; a workaround in which officers printed placeholder letters to obtain a number for a telephone caller led the authors to restate the principle as allocation at the first moment a person outside the office can hold the number.

@misc{slop_vqtff1,
  author       = {Vigdis Emenike and Brynjar Obiora and Solveig Adeyemi},
  title        = {No Number Before the Envelope: A Design Science Study of a Correspondence Register for a Small Licensing Office},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.vqtff1},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-no-number-before-vqtff1/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}