Ya Think?

From CNN.com:


The prosecutor in the Duke University lacrosse rape case violated ethics standards in statements to the media about the case, North Carolina's bar complained Thursday.

Wow, this is a total shock. [smirk]

Now, on the work front, we have people (end users) wondering why the SAP system that is used by them is slow. Lessee:

1) End of month reporting
2) End of quarter reporting
3) End of year reporting
4) The systems were not designed for this heavy of a load from every location at once.

All of these transactions are being done by customers from every country nearly at the same time. Huge requests are being queued up and the buffers are not able to handle the load. Top that off with the fact that failed transactions will back the system up even further until those transactions are recalled, canceled, or corrected...the submitters rarely ever do this. The mindset is to submit, wait, complain. No forethought is used to help the system. We are talking about BILLIONS of dollars in transactions.

The techs keep telling the customers, "Schedule smaller jobs. Bigger jobs are slowing down the system." The system has a wizard that will help a user do this, but most of them never use it.

The really bad thing is 2-fold:

1) We own IT, even though our customers have several vendors that provide it. We supply the biggest part as well managing the entire process. Now consider that most, if not all the vendors compete globally with each other, we are in a precarious situation.

2) With all the attempts to trim costs, our customer has gotten rid of a lot of the redundancy that used to exist. Yes, it was expensive, but was it more expensive than the lost revenue caused by a system that is down without that redundancy?

Our customer's upper mgmt seems to understand the trade off, but they average Joe/Jane end user does not. They still are mad at us because in their eyes, we are IT. And we are, but it can be difficult when you have 2-3 competing companies working on an issue and the problem appears to be with one group but they will not do anything unless the other group jumps through all the formality hoops first. Sigh.

Needless to say, this next 5-7 days will be very nerve wracking. Today will be the day that most of the transactions are pushed and the system is already heavily ladened.

Lord, I am really gonna need your help the next 7 days.