Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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TragicMonkey said:
But whoever writes the test plan should at least talk to the users, when coming up with workflows to test. My last implemenation project had a horrific testing because the idiots writing the test plans knew nothing about the workflow, and would order the testers (who were the builders anyway, but by making us follow undeviatingly from their mighty test plan supposedly that was cancelled out) to do the test plans exactly as written no matter how nonsensical or impossible they were.

My favorite was a week-long argument trying to get them to understand that even the best clinics aren't doing liver transplants as outpatient procedures, and that's why it's impossible to schedule one that way in our system. They insisted it was shoddy build rather than legitimate medical practice that made that not work. They also didn't understand why we made it impossible to schedule dead people for future follow-up appointments. No offense, public, but after you die your doctors don't care whether your weight is in an acceptable BMI range. After death you are allowed to let yourself go. Most people lose weight postmortem, gradually if buried and a lot at once if cremated.
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"Talk to the USERS"? Whoever in Hell does that at any stage of a project? My wife in her working career as a user lived through three complete rewrites of the system her department used. Each one was more user unfriendly than the previous. At the time number three was launched productivity became so bad that management rolled thing back to the previous version (and, considering what that must have cost in human resources, this illustrates how bad it was) and started over. This time she said, "We had some guys come and talk to us and to see what we do; that's never happened before!" :boggled:
 
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Trebuchet said:
Nothing in all of history has consumed as much paper as trying to go paperless.
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Actually, I disagree. A lot of business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions still use paper because it's permanent (save for fire,) not subject to a hard drive failure somewhere, and has legal status.

Where the "paperless" has occurred is in internal company operations. I started working with computers professionally over thirty years ago. The norm back then was printed reports created overnight from batch runs on the mainframe, usually coming off a high-speed printer on continuous fan-fold paper. The operator would have to separate the reports and provide for distribution throughout the office(s). I recall printing reports for hedge fund balances, company structure, inventory levels, sales numbers, profit and loss, accounts receivable and payable, balance sheets, etc.

These days batch runs on the mainframe are far less common. A lot of business happens on "real time" computer systems. Daily printed reports aren't needed because the information they once contained is now available instantly on the computer screen.

As a programmer, it's been absolute ages since I've sat down with a printed copy of source code and a printed core dump or abend report. The source code's now on my nice big monitor; I typically use 132 columns by 50 rows (6,600 characters total.) No more 80 columns by 25 rows, of which only 23 were usable (1,840 characters, or a mere 28% the size I use now.) That small screen gave a much smaller "window" into the source and was why printouts were nice to have. Not to mention the fact I can have multiple editor windows open at once to see disparate files.

On the consumer side, there's still a fair amount of paper, although more companies are offering paperless statements. I can go online to my bank and see the last several years of transactions, so I no longer need monthly statements. My credit cards are the same way. I still get paper for licenses, insurance, and taxes. And I appreciate paper invoices and receipts when I buy something.
 
Yep, when I started in 1984 they were converting the highspeed printers to use contiinuous roll of paper taller than me as they couldn't load the boxes of paper fast enough. One report came to 30 boxes of paper per copy. My job as a trainee was to install and configure an online report viewer (IBM's RMDS).
One of the guys in the printroom started riding along with the reports in the van to check at all the offices if they still wanted them and he was greeted like a hero. The offices had been trying to stop these reports for years.
It taught me a lot, like find out what the real situation is, how to document for users (I had a pal who used the system and we stayed late one night writing a guide) as well as lots of technical stuff. Viewing usage stats for that 30-box report almost nobody ever looked at more than the first page.

Nowadays, well I've been trying to get people off sodding Word for ages. If you use a tool designed to output to paper and don't teach people how to optimize it for online viewing then they'll print it.

People do what's easy or what they know. At one office admin complained that people kept using paper towels instead of the hand dryers and couldn't figure out why. We kept telling them the paper towels were beside the sinks and the dryers across the room so people washed their hands and the towels were right there. No thought required.
 
One day last year I came into the office to find my boss stacking four hundred large boxes full of documents into a row of empty cubes. "I thought we were trying to go paperless?" I said. "This is us trying to go paperless. Before we tried we had a warehouse for this."

Sadly, a great deal of our current paperlessness is because people scan paper documents into the system as images. Which is great for users wanting to read those documents online, but try explaining to executives why we can't pull data from those documents via querying and reporting. "But they ARE in the system!" "Yes, but as images. The system doesn't know how to read!"
 
Wudang said:
Yep, when I started in 1984 they were converting the highspeed printers to use contiinuous roll of paper taller than me as they couldn't load the boxes of paper fast enough. One report came to 30 boxes of paper per copy. My job as a trainee was to install and configure an online report viewer (IBM's RMDS).
One of the guys in the printroom started riding along with the reports in the van to check at all the offices if they still wanted them and he was greeted like a hero. The offices had been trying to stop these reports for years.
It taught me a lot, like find out what the real situation is, how to document for users (I had a pal who used the system and we stayed late one night writing a guide) as well as lots of technical stuff. Viewing usage stats for that 30-box report almost nobody ever looked at more than the first page.
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Heh. At a former job I was the only person who ran reports, I had to put the results into Excel and email them to the users. The list of "required" monthly reports ballooned from thirty to two hundred. I suspected some of them weren't being used, but the users insisted they still needed absolutely all of them. I think they felt it was a power thing, to admit to not needing a report was to admit to being less important? So I'd occasionally send out a few completely empty Excel spreadsheets named with the name of the report, as if I'd forgotten to paste the data into the template. If nobody responded "hey, this is blank" it proved they hadn't opened it and thus didn't actually need it.
 
I've literally watched an old woman type something up in her computer, print it out, walk it over to another old woman, and watch that old woman type what the first old woman typed into her computer... into the same program who's entire point is to not do that and then throw the paper away. And they'll do it constantly throughout the day instead of just... sending the info to them using the computer.

Basically we have about... 40% of our userbase that still doesn't grasp the concept of "a network" and treat their medical records software as just a... word processer.

I'm honestly thinking this company is going to be shocked with how much pointless, inefficient work takes places when they old women start stepping down/quitting/retiring.

Like you could replace them at a 3 to 1 ratio with someone who's capable of functionally using a computer efficiently.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Sadly, a great deal of our current paperlessness is because people scan paper documents into the system as images. Which is great for users wanting to read those documents online, but try explaining to executives why we can't pull data from those documents via querying and reporting. "But they ARE in the system!" "Yes, but as images. The system doesn't know how to read!"
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I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we're on the cusp of Optical Character Recognition finally getting good enough to break through the barrier of being good enough to depend on and that stops being a thing.

We maintain a person just to type in physical bank checks.
 
If sufficiently irked with someone's crappy screenshot I would sometimes load it in OneNote which had quite a decent OCR and then send them the text back and ask them to confirm. When they did I'd reply with "sorry our problem database contains no hits for 'exce1'".

"I have a problem."
"Sorry this is IT support, not genetics."
 
JoeMorgue said:
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we're on the cusp of Optical Character Recognition finally getting good enough to break through the barrier of being good enough to depend on and that stops being a thing.
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Last year I was at a demo where a scanner could not only OCR the doc but translate it, with about 98% efficiency. The tech is there, the will is not.

JoeMorgue said:
We maintain a person just to type in physical bank checks.
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I'm a consultant and the only cheque I've handled this year was from a USAian law firm. No-one in Europe uses them.
 
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Cheques are still relatively common in Canada. Provincial government departments still mail them out, although the federal government prefers to use direct deposit. I'm running a small business assisting people with computer (and other electronic equipment) issues. Payment is generally in cash or cheque, primarily because doing a bank transfer isn't all that straightforward here. Plus it sometimes costs some money; for example a transfer using Interac costs me a dollar.
 
catsmate said:
Last year I was at a demo where a scanner could not only OCR the doc but translate it, with about 98% efficiency. The tech is there, the will is not.
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98% is worthless for an OCR. That means that I have to edit something on every couple of lines of text.


I'm a consultant and the only cheque I've handled this year was from a USAian law firm. No-one in Europe uses them.
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US law firms tend to be picky about payments. Firms under twenty attorneys may have only two people even authorized to sign checks. The owners like to see every penny that is sent out.
 
quadraginta said:
Are physical checks the only way they can monitor the disbursement of funds?
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No, but it is the way they like to. It requires them to stop, think about the recipient, the amount of the check, and the justification presented for the expense before they actually put pen to paper.

It is a habit built up from years of reviewing work from subordinates in the same manner.

I've had talks with several firm leaders that say the day you aren't signing the checks is the day the spending goes through the roof. It's a mindset.
 
Dr. Keith said:
98% is worthless for an OCR. That means that I have to edit something on every couple of lines of text.
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I regularly work with documents on the EPA's Pesticide Product and Label System website, which contains PDFs of the labels of every pesticide product registered for use in the United States. A few years ago, they switched from PDFS of scanned images of the labels to OCR PDFs. I thought "Great, we can copy and paste text onto our labels when our suppliers' master labels update." It didn't quite work out that way, although it's gotten better over the last two years. Some of them still produce blocks of gibberish as recently as late last year.
 
I'll assume 98% is roughly better than a 68 year old woman doing that slow, deliberate one finger "look and peck" typing is going to do, so it would still be a net win.
 
I had to call Comcast Business support to T/S a connectivity issue.

They have literally added fake "typing on a keyboard sounds" in the background to their automated troubleshooting fake voice. Like literally robot lady will like ask for your account number then they play fake keyboard typing sounds as if she is literally typing it into a computer.
 
Armitage72 said:
I regularly work with documents on the EPA's Pesticide Product and Label System website, which contains PDFs of the labels of every pesticide product registered for use in the United States. A few years ago, they switched from PDFS of scanned images of the labels to OCR PDFs. I thought "Great, we can copy and paste text onto our labels when our suppliers' master labels update." It didn't quite work out that way, although it's gotten better over the last two years. Some of them still produce blocks of gibberish as recently as late last year.
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So pretty much like the interns in the department have managed to do for decades - technology really is catching up!
 
JoeMorgue said:
I had to call Comcast Business support to T/S a connectivity issue.

They have literally added fake "typing on a keyboard sounds" in the background to their automated troubleshooting fake voice. Like literally robot lady will like ask for your account number then they play fake keyboard typing sounds as if she is literally typing it into a computer.
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xterra said:
Think of it like this. They could have added sounds of:
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The reality - go to 2:22:

 
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