Does anybody else feel frustrated at work?

It just seems that HQ are forever taking simple systems that work, and 
replacing them with complex systems that don't work.

The irony of all this is that they do this to "simplify" and 
"streamline" our business process. Ha!

One of the main things they like to do is change it so that al 5 sites 
do things the same way. Well, it does make sense to standardise. But 
*why* do they insist on standardising on the worst possible thing?

Examples:

1. We had a different accounts package at all 5 sites. Obviously, this 
is highly suboptimal. So we decided to standardise. On Micro$oft Axapta. 
This cost us $1 million US. And yet it doesn't seem to "understand" 
about VAT.

(But then, neither do the guys in HQ, despite us explaining it multiple 
times. They even had our accountant phone the Inland Revenue to 
offocially ask if we can call it "sales tax" on the invoice. They were 
really shocked when the answer was "no"...)

Initially the software was configured with the UK currency as "lbs". (!)

Due to the software's total inability to print an invoice that shows our 
VAT registration number on it, the application administrator in HQ 
helpfully suggested that we just write that onto the invoice afterwards 
with a black pen. (Dude, WTF? You get somebody to do a few hundred 
thousand pounds worth of work for you, and then they send you a printed 
invoice with hand-written corrections, *what* are you going to think 
about that company??)

Last I heard, we're still running the old accounts package in parallel 
with the new one *just* so it can do the correct VAT calculations and 
print out usable invoices that we can actually send to customers. This 
has trippled our accountant's workload. (She has to process every 
transaction twice, and then there's a whole heap of extra work cross 
checking the two sets of accounts against each other and rectifying 
differences...)

2. It was decided that we would standardise on a specific model of PC 
and a specific model of laptop, so they would all be the same. So who 
did they choose? IBM? HP? Acer?

Nope. They chose Dell, the most overpriced supplier on the market. 
Brilliant!

(It turns out that not only are Dell on average 2.2x more expensive, 
they also take several weeks to deliver each item.)

My company must be wasting *tens of thousands* of dollars a year on 
Dell. I mean, how stupid can you get?

3. We currently have a system with 5 seperate Active Directory domains 
(in the same tree), one for each site. This works very well. So they 
want to merge all the domains into one. I cannot seem to make them 
comprehend what a stupid idea this is.

Our existing domain layout works just fine. So *why* are we expending 
effort changing it in the first place?

If we merge all the domains, any time anybody in the company changes 
their password, the change will have to be replicated to all 5 sites 
globally. Why? It's extremely rare for anybody to try to log in from a 
different site. Not to mention that the other sites are all about 10x 
bigger than the UK site. So we're now going to be flooded with useless 
network traffic over our already massively-overloaded Internet connection.

But for me, the biggest problem is managability. We're taking 5 seperate 
things which *should* be clearly seperated, and mashing them all 
together into 1 big unmanagable blob. Oh, but don't worry - we'll use 
OUs! [bangs head against well]

4. I was going to buy new network switches for the new building. It 

Gigabit Ethernet switches, so it'll go a bit faster for certain PCs.

But then HQ got involved. And they want me to buy Cisco Catalyst 

switches we already have. So right there, you just wiped out the entire 
advantage of upgrading plus you made it 4x more expensive than I was 



5. This just in - HQ have proposed a new, standardised company-wide 
computer naming scheme.

They want to name each computer according to where it is in the building.

The obvious problem here, of course, is that as soon as you move a PC, 
you now have to rename it. Quite apart from the occasional software that 
breaks if you change the computer name, computers names are how we track 
our hardware. So having more than one name for a given computer is an 
*extremely bad thing*.

(I refer you to C. J. Date, who says that "a primary key should be an 
arbitrary code having absolutely no real-world significance, so that it 
will never ever need to be changed". Well, the computer name is our 
primary key!)

If I rename a computer, I have to print a new label to stick to the 
case, I have to annotate the logbook, I have to file a new computer 
hardware record page and have the old page officially archived, and so 
forth. And it now means that if you see a document referring to a 
computer name that isn't around any more, you have to go search through 
all the logbooks to find out what that computer is called now. (And if 
you can't find it, then it must have been decommissioned.)

Even better, since machines are named according to where they are, there 
is even the terrifying possibility that the same name might refer to 
different physical computers at different points in time! This, surely, 
our QA guys will simply not accept.

And why have they chosen this silly scheme? "So that when you browse the 
network, all the computers will appear in sorted order. And whenever you 
see an error about machine XXXXX, you'll instantly know where it is." 
Yeah, well, that's why I assign machines an arbitrary unique number and 
keep a database of where each one is. It's very easy to update a 
database; much harder to rename a PC.

My question has to be *WUUUUIIIIEEE* don't they just use the "computer 
description" field? That can be changed on a whim and has no impact on 
anything. Then to find out where a computer is, all you have to do is 
browse the network and right next to the name, it'll say where that PC 
is. And you don't even have to "encode" the information in any way; it's 
a free-form text field. WHAT'S SO DAMN HARD ABOUT THAT?!??

(Even more amusing is their suggestion that we similarly name servers 
according to what they do. So each time that changes I have to rename 
servers - guaranteed to break software in nontrivial ways, not to 
mention all the procedure doucments that will have to be revised, 
officially reviewed and reissued because they mention servers by name... 
No, I'm sorry, this is absurd!)

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