RE: Efficiency AND Effectiveness. I just had to share this.

Such brilliance is not limited to the Oracle community, Steve.  I've seen
many examples of this type of genius during my career in AS/400 shops.  This
type of thinking was endemic to IT shops in the 1970s and 80s.
Unfortunately, there are a few from that era that cling to that mentality.

Donald R. Fisher, III
Project Manager
Roomstore Furniture Company
(804) 784-7600 extension 2124
DFisher@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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My wife has, for over 2 years, been project leading, for her dept. (she is
in finance) a project to automate their current system, not a biggy. Now
they had it in the USA for 12 months and not one working program, this was
mainly because the MIS manager did not believe you needed to talk to the
user to know what they wanted, I think he is cleaning toilets now. Anyways
the US washed their hands of it and the UK took over, so they did a little
talking to the user and they are now in UAT. 

So my wife is the ONLY one on the system working at home and asked me to
time (what they call a report but it is a display) a report, Invoices not
yet invoiced, 1 country, 2,000 records, 38 seconds. All countries 51,000
records 2Mins 47seconds. I think we would all agree not acceptable. Also
there is no way that the user can ever see more than the first 5,000 records
bit of a problem for the UK who had 5,500. 

Now we come to the clever part, when they first ran this last week it
crashed because 6 users ran it at once, so they changed it so each request
was queued. Now we move from the merely clever to the brilliant. But if it
doesn't run within 60 seconds it is cancelled and a message is sent asking
the user to try again later. They decided that this info was too good to
only give to the requestor, everybody should get the message (merely a case
of lazy programming I think). Well in a meeting about this my wife pointed
out to the MIS manager that there could be 1,000+ users on when this goes
live and with the response times she was getting that everyone would be
getting messages all the time, and now from the brilliant to the sheer
genius, his immediate reaction? He started calculating how much extra disk
space they would need to buy to handle it!

A shining example of analysis, design, and testing. Talk about skilled
professionals! I mean, you would need to take special courses to be so bad,
wouldn't you?  Where do they get these people from?    
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