9/9/99

[Jon.Paris@xxxxxxxxxx]

 >> Our customer service department decided that if they could not reach a
merchant, they would enter 11/11/11 for the new account call date.  .......
This is the type of things that happen
when users have their way.

This may not be the case for you Chris, but in most places where I have
encountered this kind of silliness, it has been the result of the MIS group
being so slow to respond to users needs that they finish up going their own way.
Often MIS are unaware of what has happened (you are lucky in this respect)
because the users have given up even asking for anything.

We encountered one of these situations while doing a Y2K readiness audit at a
client site.  Although the Y2K conversion seemed to have worked well for the
most part, we noticed that there was a very large number of dates clustered at
Dec 31st 1999.  Further investigation revealed that the users had decided to use
this date to indicate that a product had no expiry date.  Previously everything
they sold had an expiry date!!  Why didn't MIS know about this? Because in the
users view every request they made was always met with a "we can't do that for
at least 12 months" response from MIS.


+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---