Tired_of_lies

The Wirral data? - I thought everyone knew. Again way back in 2011 - do you remember the SIMS training data suddenly got issued again for an 'update'? Well if you wander back into the Training data from before the update you will notice that a whole load of records from the Wirral got quietly deleted from the data. If you then look up the children using the internet you will see they were quietly deleted because it was live data on real children that was issued - I think from about 2009 - and not noticed. The really embarrassing part about that was that a lot of training providers had built in and included that data in their packages, and someone from the Wirral happened to be on one of the courses and thought that the data looked a wee bit familiar.

The Tesco idea is a very good one, and let's take this a little further and look at Tesco's question of accountability. For example on the Horse meat issue. Once this became a real public issue, they walked their way back down their accountability trail, found the problems, admitted where the processes were wrong and fixed it for the future - because their customers can go to Asda or Morrisons quite easily.. Using your time machine, let's go back to approx 2011 when the scandal about the parents of the dead student were sent a letter from SIMS threatening them that their deceased child could not go to the Prom unless they improved their attendance. Unfortunately though that one issue was fixed in the SIMS system, as the customers could not switch to the other suppliers so easily, all the other letters and instances where parents will receive other letters even though their child had died that could be fixed were identified and not fixed - because it does not make commercial good sense to fix them in the full profit model.

Now that's a nice thought. Now if there was internal documentation on the old modules that was usable, instead of it all being in the lifer's heads, there would definately be a possibility of that. However, once a developer has escaped the maintenance team they will fight tooth and nail to keep working on the new stuff. They are more likely to leave and move on if there is no more new style work available. Remember that once you know the new technology and techniques you will be able to escape and get a better job - once embedded in the old side, there is no escape... ..and though there is an agreement to let the partners (like groupcall) know about the interfaces change and the contents of those changes, at any time there is no co-operative agreement to stop them writing out the partners with their own versions within a new release. I recall one of them complaining that Capita uses it's revenue to develop new changes in unfair competition - well yes, when an elephant is plodding along behind you, don't stop suddenly.

You have to take a step back from that and say from a business point of view - what does that represent? So it's worthwhile investing the money in a new set of software and interfaces to chase this market. Maintaining and improving what you have already sold is just not cost effective. From an ethical point of view taking pride in the product and making it the best you can in a business environment takes second place where you are selling into a captured market. A good example of this is the use of live Wirral children's data in the SIMS training packages data.

Yes, unfortunately the internal policy is not to make the system easier and user friendly to use, it is to push the use of the expensive training services. All suggestions for improvements from within the software teams are met with a blank wall, as these would interfere with the lucrative revenue stream. Eventually they give up and either leave, or become a 'lifer' just plodding along doing what the managers tell them. Remember that this company is there not to help you, but to maximize it's revenue. The documentation simply smokescreens the deliberate lack of UXP.