Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Bad Products, Poorly Implemented This morning, I had the unfortunate distinction to attend training for the new tracking and ticketing tool that will be used by our Office of Information Technology.  Now, being the geek that I am, nothing annoys me more than to spend three hours of my day being told by a "technical trainer" how to open and close a certain menu.  Something tells me that I would not have gotten as far as I am in my current career path had I not known how to open and close menus.  That said, the problem was not necessarily the training but the poor product we are being trained on.  Consider the following problems with the application: If you use a non-Windows operating system--Mac OS, Linux, or Unix--you are out of luck.  You will need to find a Windows machine on which to install and run the client.  Kind of funny, considering this product was supposed to have a web interface.   If you are a group that bills for service, the billing component is not quite done yet.  In our case, that means that we need to track tickets and such twice--once in our homegrown billing application and once in this new product.  Notification has not quite been solidified yet.  For example, if I know a server is down for some reason, I am supposed to waste valuable time informing our Helpless Desk of the outage.  Apparently, the message board and white board components of this application have not been designed with notifications in place. I am just amazed that we are so far along in the implementation of this product, and it looks as though we will have to deliver some type of Citrix/Terminal Services solution to address the multi-platform promised the product has yet to fulfill.  The other part--eliminating redundancy--is being encouraged in the short term.  Finally, if one of the goals of this product is to facilitate communication among different groups, why must a network administrator waste time and contact the Helpless Desk about a downed server.  I must admit that I do like the fact that they are implementing this system without everything done.  Introducing a product to the community with the promise of future improvements is good.  My only fear is that the improvements will come so slowly that it will make a snail look like the Concorde.  2:27:21 PM    comment []  trackback []