Read Online Obnoxious Librarian from Hades by Dennie Heye - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Dennie Heye
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waited almost six months before dropping it in my lap?"
"That is a wrong way of looking at this. I would like to see this as an opportunity to work out a mock up of how perhaps one day this feature might work… "
"So, you want to me to create a fake feature, so you can pretend that it works as a beta but needs some work… . and then hope they forget about it before the next meeting?"
"Can you do that?"
"I could. But that would mean re-prioritizing all my other work, and I really need to reshelf all the reference works and alphabetize the links on our intranet. But you may of course try to influence my priorities… ."
"Ok, ok, I must convince the top managers - name your price, as long as it is somehow business related so I can approve it!"
It took me a few days of screen capturing, Photoshopping, smoke and mirrors to create project "fake duck" - hey, it talks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, so it must be a duck. On screen it looks like an e-mail is automatically screened for security classification, keywords and retention period. Then in a cloud of magic glitter, the record is correctly filed into the system.
So now my boss can save his face and put up a great dog and pony show, while I can enjoy my unlimited subscription to the audio book site - so if you'll excuse me, I have 117 hours of nonstop Harry Potter to listen to.
The one where we help to select an application
It is Monday morning, 9.05am in the library and I am doing some ego surfing on the web whilst head banging to the muzak version of Metallica. Just the perfect way to start the week, were it not for the meeting at 10am.
The powers that be have decided that Hades Corp should form a strategic vision for information management using long term horizon scanning and out-of-the-box scenario thinking. This roughly translates into a frenzy amongst mid-level managers who sees this as an opportunity to get attention from senior management by pretending to have a clue where we should be heading without a lot of real work involved. This as opposed to the general management motto of "we will deal with the issues on a forward going basis". If this were not enough waste of time, they now have asked vendor X to which we sold our soul by standardizing on most of their overpriced, bug-riddled and bloated software to share their views on what Hades Corp should look for in information management.
Well, let me guess… whatever we should look for is exactly what vendor X has on their development schedule. Vendor X has Hades Corp almost completely in their claws, except for the records management and library system. Oh, they tried to sell us their "solutions". Not that they have anything that even resembles a library system. Or a records management system that I would wish upon my worst enemy. But hey, their sales staff schmoozed the top IT managers, the right gold cuff links where offered and Hollywood award winning PowerPoint presentations did the trick. I had to do a proof of concept with their software and compare it to our current not-so-state-of-the-art-but-working-just-fine-thank-you applications.
So I checked their specifications with our user requirements, which miserably failed. Their products could do the basics but did a lot we don't need.
Management told me that specs aren't always what they seem and users never know what they want, so let's do a pilot to really get a final verdict - vendor X is paying for all the costs. So they flew in their top consultants and their best engineers to pull this off.
They had a week to create an acceptable pilot setup with competing goals: I wanted to prove my point that we should stick to what we have; vendor X desperately wanted to prove their applications were the best thing since sliced bread.
All week I wore the polo shirt with the logo from our current vendor and I provided the vendor X staff with a copy of the current setup. Of course I made it a bit more challenging by corrupting certain
"That is a wrong way of looking at this. I would like to see this as an opportunity to work out a mock up of how perhaps one day this feature might work… "
"So, you want to me to create a fake feature, so you can pretend that it works as a beta but needs some work… . and then hope they forget about it before the next meeting?"
"Can you do that?"
"I could. But that would mean re-prioritizing all my other work, and I really need to reshelf all the reference works and alphabetize the links on our intranet. But you may of course try to influence my priorities… ."
"Ok, ok, I must convince the top managers - name your price, as long as it is somehow business related so I can approve it!"
It took me a few days of screen capturing, Photoshopping, smoke and mirrors to create project "fake duck" - hey, it talks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, so it must be a duck. On screen it looks like an e-mail is automatically screened for security classification, keywords and retention period. Then in a cloud of magic glitter, the record is correctly filed into the system.
So now my boss can save his face and put up a great dog and pony show, while I can enjoy my unlimited subscription to the audio book site - so if you'll excuse me, I have 117 hours of nonstop Harry Potter to listen to.
The one where we help to select an application
It is Monday morning, 9.05am in the library and I am doing some ego surfing on the web whilst head banging to the muzak version of Metallica. Just the perfect way to start the week, were it not for the meeting at 10am.
The powers that be have decided that Hades Corp should form a strategic vision for information management using long term horizon scanning and out-of-the-box scenario thinking. This roughly translates into a frenzy amongst mid-level managers who sees this as an opportunity to get attention from senior management by pretending to have a clue where we should be heading without a lot of real work involved. This as opposed to the general management motto of "we will deal with the issues on a forward going basis". If this were not enough waste of time, they now have asked vendor X to which we sold our soul by standardizing on most of their overpriced, bug-riddled and bloated software to share their views on what Hades Corp should look for in information management.
Well, let me guess… whatever we should look for is exactly what vendor X has on their development schedule. Vendor X has Hades Corp almost completely in their claws, except for the records management and library system. Oh, they tried to sell us their "solutions". Not that they have anything that even resembles a library system. Or a records management system that I would wish upon my worst enemy. But hey, their sales staff schmoozed the top IT managers, the right gold cuff links where offered and Hollywood award winning PowerPoint presentations did the trick. I had to do a proof of concept with their software and compare it to our current not-so-state-of-the-art-but-working-just-fine-thank-you applications.
So I checked their specifications with our user requirements, which miserably failed. Their products could do the basics but did a lot we don't need.
Management told me that specs aren't always what they seem and users never know what they want, so let's do a pilot to really get a final verdict - vendor X is paying for all the costs. So they flew in their top consultants and their best engineers to pull this off.
They had a week to create an acceptable pilot setup with competing goals: I wanted to prove my point that we should stick to what we have; vendor X desperately wanted to prove their applications were the best thing since sliced bread.
All week I wore the polo shirt with the logo from our current vendor and I provided the vendor X staff with a copy of the current setup. Of course I made it a bit more challenging by corrupting certain
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