Redundant duplication redundancy
Joey the Accordion Guy just pointed to a highly entertaining little cartoon over at Rory Blyth's Neopoleon.com.
The cartoon tells the tale of a meeting full of fluffy marketing twits, trying to figure out how to port data from an Access database.
For the record: I'm guilty of having worked as senior marketing twit for a number of unfeasibly large companies.
I can personally attest to the terrifying accuracy of this "process of discovery", as Rory calls it, having found myself, on more than one ocassion, in the midst of discussions exactly like this one.
My all time favourite was the one about the CEO's assistant who had printed and filed copies of all his email. Cretinous, yes - and yet not all that uncommon.
But it gets better...
We'd just implemented a document management system right across the corporate network. The CEO wanted all his old email indexed so that he'd be able to search on it. But the efficient EA had deleted all of his old email ("but that's what IT told me to do - that's why I printed them").
No problem! They realised they still had all the printed copies - so they set up a process to scan and OCR the entire archive. I promise, I'm not making this up.
Doubly utterly cretinous?
Yes - but wait, there's more...
The company this happened at was a software developer. And guess what kind of software we developed?
Yup - you guessed it. Document management software. The very same document management system we had just finished installing.
I pointed out that we could always retrieve the old email from the backup tapes, then headed back to my office to polish up the C.V.
