I confess, I am a bit of an Anglophile. In addition to the rich history of Britain, I like British crime dramas, and often I pick up a bit of new language whilst watching. The other day, I encountered the colourful word “bumf” and thought it interesting, so I looked it up. “Bumf” refers to useless or tedious paperwork. I am sure that we have all encountered bumf in our professional lives—those annoying administrative things we end up doing that simply waste time and energy every day.
A decade or so ago, a McKinsey & Co. study found that the average employee spends 47% of their workday reading and answering email and searching and gathering information. Bumf. More recently the journal Annals of Internal Medicine reported that, for each patient a doctor sees, they spend an average of 16 minutes on associated paperwork. Bumf.
Things that Go Bumf in the Night
What is fascinating, though, is how many people I have seen that are caught up in bumf and do not even realize it. Here at Coviant Software, we see bumf incarnate in many customers’ activities. When it comes to the secure exchange of information between a company and its external partners, suppliers, vendors, or clients there is a shocking amount of tedium and needless work going on. Writing (and rewriting and debugging and fixing and extending for each business request…) a script or batch file that started out so very simply back in the day is now an unmanageable tangle of code that is barely understood by current employees and only marginally stable.
The manual processes of file transfer itself if rife with bumf. Looking for files, encrypting files (you do encrypt, don’t you?), looking up recipient information, scheduling the transfer, checking to make sure it got where it needed to go, and making a record of each transfer. Then, if something goes amiss, tracking down the cause, making sure there was no accidental breach, mitigating the problem and going through the process all over again. Bumf, bumf, and more bumf.
BAMF, not Bumf
There’s another word—an acronym actually—that looks a lot like bumf, but when you swap the U for an A it radically changes the meaning. And if you are sick and tired of dealing with the bumf of manual file transfers, you can become a BAMF by upgrading to secure, managed file transfers with the award-winning Diplomat MFT from Coviant Software.
Coviant Software has wrapped nearly two decades of in-the-trenches experience working with some of the largest healthcare services providers, manufacturers, financial services firms, retailers, government agencies, law firms, and other organizations that have a lot of sensitive information that has to move securely and on-time to vendors, partners, and regulators. That knowledge, and a lot of listening to the customer, means Diplomat MFT delivers a no-code simple experience that automates key information security, privacy, and management features like encryption, documentation, confirmation and alert notification, and scheduling to make the necessary task of sending and receiving files secure, easy, and reliable.
Some organizations also appreciate that we offer Diplomat MFT at an ethical price, but they really appreciate that we give them peace of mind that their file transfers are taken care of, even when they have to follow laws like HIPAA, GLBA, SOX, GDPR, and more. Like Jules Winnfield turning the tables on Ringo during a hold-up in a Los Angeles diner, when you are armed with Diplomat MFT you can turn the tables on bumf and turn yourself into a managed file transfer BAMF: Bad Ass Managed Filetransferer.
