Worst IT horror story ever?
I just heard about this from friend who encountered this himself this week:
About 10 years ago, Very Big Corporation implemented a Lotus Notes database to track employee requests for Service X from an outside vendor. (The story is already looking bad: how could someone 10 years ago not have known that Lotus Notes was a dead-end?) The "database" was used mostly for its form capabilities: by routing through Lotus Notes, apparently it was very easy to get a form up that forced data entry of the required fields in the proper formats.
Five years ago, Very Big Corporation decommissioned Lotus Notes and deployed at different mail and messaging service. Well, decommissioned Lotus Notes except for this one application. But since no one any longer has an active Notes login, now, five years after the decommissioning, my friend just spent three hours on the phone with technical support trying to get his login working again, so that he could make one very simple request to purchase a license for Service X for a new employee. Apparently, every time a new employee needs X, which is semi-often, the same problem comes up again, and it takes a similarly long time to solve each time it does.
And here is what will slay you: the Notes "database" is only being used as a queue: regularly, a living human being has to go into the database, and handle the most recent requests by calling up the vendor of Service X, and reading whoever answers the phone the required fields. Literally thousands of hours have been spent getting people logged in to a defunct application so they can make these requests...
When in about five minutes, any moderately competent web programmer could create a web page with those fields on it, validate them, and send a mail to serviceXrequests@verybigcorp.com with the request. The queue would just be that inbox, and the people who call vendor X could share the account.
Five minutes!
About 10 years ago, Very Big Corporation implemented a Lotus Notes database to track employee requests for Service X from an outside vendor. (The story is already looking bad: how could someone 10 years ago not have known that Lotus Notes was a dead-end?) The "database" was used mostly for its form capabilities: by routing through Lotus Notes, apparently it was very easy to get a form up that forced data entry of the required fields in the proper formats.
Five years ago, Very Big Corporation decommissioned Lotus Notes and deployed at different mail and messaging service. Well, decommissioned Lotus Notes except for this one application. But since no one any longer has an active Notes login, now, five years after the decommissioning, my friend just spent three hours on the phone with technical support trying to get his login working again, so that he could make one very simple request to purchase a license for Service X for a new employee. Apparently, every time a new employee needs X, which is semi-often, the same problem comes up again, and it takes a similarly long time to solve each time it does.
And here is what will slay you: the Notes "database" is only being used as a queue: regularly, a living human being has to go into the database, and handle the most recent requests by calling up the vendor of Service X, and reading whoever answers the phone the required fields. Literally thousands of hours have been spent getting people logged in to a defunct application so they can make these requests...
When in about five minutes, any moderately competent web programmer could create a web page with those fields on it, validate them, and send a mail to serviceXrequests@verybigcorp.com with the request. The queue would just be that inbox, and the people who call vendor X could share the account.
Five minutes!
Comments
Post a Comment