Re: WTF
Preach it, Tom 38.
My employer makes and maintains databases, which companies use to keep customer records. By the nature of our business, most of our clients are private-sector, but there are some exceptions (across multiple countries). And contrary to popular belief, given the choice between a public-sector and private-sector client to serve, nobody I know would choose the former, regardless of country.
There's a - not lack, exactly, but a strange arse-about-face quality to accountability, which means that decision making is invariably handed off to the highest ranking person around - i.e. the one least qualified to make a decision that affects the day-to-day workflows of the poor schmucks on the coalface.
There's an ungodly high turnover of decision makers, which means that decisions taken today can be revised, reversed or just plain forgotten two or three times by the end of the year.
Couple this with an insistence on rigid forms and procedures, and you have a formula whereby features have to be built, delivered and tested as promised, even long after everyone involved knows (and quite openly agrees) that they are useless. Because no-one has, or is willing to use, the authority to cancel or change them. That's about as motivating as you would imagine.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
