I will never get how or why companies put up with this kind of stuff from software vendors considering the cost of the products.
This is how itās done at the Los Angeles Federal Court for US Justice Department employees. You canāt just leave your badge with your computer because you canāt enter buildings or floors without it.
Of course not, you know how hard it is to get multipurpose hours when managing a project? And of course when hours shaving time comes guess what gets sacrificed first?
Yes, thatās right, effectiveness.
But we have pretty reports about what we incorrectly think our people are doing!
in our case, mainly because the cost to change away from the old system to the new system was high. would the grass be greener elsewhere? would the cost to change ( again ) be worth it?
weāve arrived at a de facto lock-in.
i suspect thatās the case for many folks. better the devil you know.
Depending on the area it could be that thereās just not that much competition. In libraries I know there arenāt a lot of choices.
And thereās just institutional resistance to change. Thereās no motivation to fix problems if the high level people donāt push it.
Another issue on the end user side (nurses, docs, etcā¦) that drives ānon-complianceā is that electronic medical records are (in my experience) terrible storytellers. Codified data is great for reports, but digging through a record to figure out what the hell actually happenedā¦ Ugh.
And Iām just talking retrospective review. Doing it real time is an order of magnitude worse.
Thatās retarded. Like, seriously, were your employers severely brain-damaged? Because thatās the only excuse I can think of for this. Like in a past life, they were heavyweight boxers, and now their encephalopathy is starting to kick in.
The PIN still needs to be changed ever 90 days, but itās still much easier to remember than the 9 character minimum 2xupper/lower/number/special passwords that expire at the same rate.
Mine never did but it was minimum 8 numbers and they locked accounts real fast if anyone is trying to brute force, plus you would need a laptop with the company image and be on site/or have an account that is allowed VPN access.
it works as intended.
āThen I can only conclude that your intentions are malign.ā
Or, as often as not (from the devās POV), āitās exactly what you asked for, itās just not what you wanted.ā
Iāve been on both sides of this equation, and itās no fun for anyone involved.
The thing to remember is that most software is pretty much uniformly awful. I mean seriously, truly, terrible. Ill-conceived and poorly implemented.
Despite the hype from the āanyone can learn to codeā crowd, writing good software is hard, and the technical aspects are the easy part compared to the organizational challenges, as others have noted.
Yup.
That fucking call on the helpdesk
Caller: I updated Java. Now the timekeeping site doesnāt work.
Me: How the hell-?.. You donāt have administrator rights. You canāt update java. Fine. Iām logging in and cleaning this upā¦ (uninstalls all versions of java, somehow thereās six different versions installed. Reinstall the correct version for running the timekeeping site. Confirm that the timekeeping site is working again)
Five minutes later
Same caller: You broke my purchase ordering site.
Me: Let me take a look
(turns out they have reinstalled an additional 2 versions of java. Somehow.)
Me: why did you install java again?
Caller: timekeeping site said so.
Me: but it was working five minutes ago. I told you not to install anything and to just exit out of the java update prompt. (I tried installing java with the IDS still on. It didnāt work. So this user knows how to disable the IDS without the admin username and password.)
Caller: Hey buddy, Iām not a nerd like you.
Me: Alright. Iām going to talk with my colleagues and weāll figure out how to get you setup right.
(hangs up. Starts crying because I canāt fix stupid. Is handed a tissue by the boss.)
This, please. Actually, what I really want is for the developer to follow me around and see how I want to work and where I need my data. Then work with me to design an interface that assists me to get what I need where I need it. Then he can go away and write the business rules stuff that populates the interface from the database below it.
Instead we get asked what we need the system to do; some then idiot goes and buys a system from a vendor that persuades them that it does just that, and I have to change my workflows and work around a system that works the way someone else thinks it should. Everyone with an office is happy because they saved money and āgave the clinicians what they wantā and we end up circumventing the ghastly thing just to work at all ā¦
Really? That should be the first thing.
Thatās supposed to be someoneās dedicated job, not an afterthought thrown onto a reluctant backend devās plate.
Iām SO glad I retired last year! Sign me
Anesthesiologist who got out just in time
Yes, it should be, but I can think of a couple of reasons why it isnāt. The first is companies that see things like design and usability as unimportant. My experience is in libraries but it sounds like this might apply to hospital software too. Instead of a separate design team the people, or person, doing the background coding gets saddled with making the whole bowl of wax.
On the other side that attitude is encouraged by customers. Again in my experience itās rarely the people who will actually use the software who make the purchasing decision. The decision is made by administrators who donāt necessarily get input from the people whoāll be using the software.
Those administrators may also act as gatekeepers, actively preventing user complaints from going anywhere. But, hey, the important thing is those administrators have people skills!
Could be worse, imagine if they got the babies and wedding cakes mixed up on the holding/eating parts
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