Ok, so my absence this time is not so much nothing to say, more of the opposite really but a little too heated and personal to broadcast in the currently close quarters. On the other hand I have been playing with google Buzz – on the plus side it’s better for quick blogging, but it does make me realise that I only have 2 avid followers (and that includes myself).
Anyhow, this story amused me no end today.
As an ex developer and business analyst of some 20 years the story starts with he age old hatred of the sales guy, and I immediately sided with Gerald. The story continues with the (also age old) story of half a dozen workable solutions being shot down for some idiotic reason or other and then finally ending up with a massively complex and costly solution… and the sting in the tail.. for a single user.
This reminds me of a recent project I was partly involved in. We had spend the best part of a year redesigning our server infrastructure to reduce the complexity and remove the incompatibility of multiple software applications interfering with each other. I was very proud of the solution – it was almost beautiful in its simplicity and resilience. A month or so later my utopia was sullied…
The management had announced that they had reviewed many Management Information applications and decided on one, and now that all the hard work of decision making and procurement had been done, all we had to do now was to install it and implement the needs of the business – apparently this should only take us a couple of weeks.
Hmmm….
Systems – Ok, can we please see your requirements?
Business – Errrrrrm, what’s that then?
Systems – Can we see the systems specs you need to run the software?
Business – Errrrrrrm, We’ll give you the contact details of the vendor.
<Sigh>
The really niggling thing was that we already had an in-house reporting tool that could connect to ANY data source and report on it. All that was needed was a simple input front end and some graphics on the output, which could be done with some macros in excel – an entire process that could have been performed in 1 month by 2 people. Instead we ended up spending several dozens of thousands of pounds on licensing a product that only just kinda outputs the same mess that we previously had just not quite as fast, and several months by a cast of dozens to implement the underlying implementation that we had to coerce because the application didn’t support what we wanted anyway.
The only reason I can see that this was done was that one person wasn’t able to use Excel.
But it’s even worse than that… the existing system aside, there are several well trained and qualified people around that ‘one person’ that would have cherished the opportunity to update the excel version at no real cost and in a fraction of the time.
You have to love “business”.
