[LINK] Dealing with Your IAP

[Frank O'Connor]

Mmmm,

Having spent some years developing corporate apps I'm in complete agreement here.

The suits tend to want MIS and other 'management' functionality, whereas users simply want something that makes their jobs easier and adds value. As a developer I tended to side with the users, but the suits are the source of the cash.

So, unfortunately, the suits tend to win ... so you get bloated apps that excel at providing pointless figures, ratios and reporting to managers, but which have little in the way of functionality, effectiveness and value to the actual user. The suits then complain about the 'lack of good data' that they get from the apps when the users realise that the app adds nothing of value to their lives, and is simply another means of providing a veritable hoard of useless data to executives ... so they just fill the app with whatever data they think the suits want (or don't want in the case of the increasing majority who become disgruntled with the app) ... and the whole damn exercise disppears up the enterprise's fundament as another failure in IT.

Open source apps tend to circumvent a lot of the above (especially when the developer lies to the suits about how difficult it would be to add modules or functionality to produce MIS and management stats) and have a much better success rate in improving business processes, making life easier on the line, and adding value to the enterprise than either off-the-shelf (MS, Oracle etc) or internally developed applications ... because they are not developed with the suit in mind.
----
On 19/04/2012, at 10:56 PM, Craig Sanders wrote:

> 
> most of all, it's important to use a support ticketing system that's
> designed to be a tool for the support staff to help them do their jobs,
> rather than designed to be a time and motion system for call-center
> managers so that they can micromanage and harass the serfs who do the
> support work.
> 
> there may be some exceptions, but that generally means using open source
> ticketing systems because they're actually designed and written by
> people who use them every day, rather than by companies who see managers
> as their target market.
> 
> craig
> 
> -- 
> craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link