Years ago when I encountered big-company software flubs that were screamingly bad I would wonder about them: all those people, all that money, all those MBA-led processes and controls -- how could they screw up basic software things? What's wrong with them?
Now I know more. I know the flubs I saw weren't exceptions. They were and are the rule. I know that big corporate and government organizations are incapable of building reliable, cost-effective software. I have identified many of the contributing causes to this disturbing phenomenon, but there's much that isn't known. What's worse, all of the important people, leaders of academia, government and industry, ignore and/or deny this fact.
Yet Another Inexcusable, Simple Stumble
I've covered many big organization face-plants in the past. In order to make it clear that the awfulness isn't just crippling software fails but encompasses a broad range of consumer-dissing inconvenience, I'll show some software that "works" but puts customer inconvenience front and center.
I got a bill from my gas utility provider. Utility company billing has been around for awhile, right? Treating your customers decently and getting paid should be high on the list of any company's priorities, right? How long have auto-pay and e-billing been around -- just flew out this year, didn't they? Bad joke. We all know that auto-pay of some kind has been around for decades, and so has some form of e-billing. So how long do you think it should take for a giant, lumbering company to modify their billing software so that auto-pay is handled reasonably well? Common sense says it should only take a couple months, but rich, giant company maybe a year? Two years? Let's say that by any reasonable measure it should have been completely nailed by 2010, over a decade ago.
Let's look at a bill I just got from my local gas utility. It was an e-bill -- hooray!
I read the above. I immediately think -- hey, I've got this account on auto-pay; what's this with Click here to make a payment?? I'm on auto-pay!
I keep reading and next see this:
Great. If -- If -- If I'm enrolled in Auto Pay? What??? You guys don't know if I'm enrolled in auto-pay?? Your software went to my account master record in your database. You extracted my name, billing address, e-mail address and current amount owed. It's hard to imagine that my auto-pay status isn't also there -- after all, you knew enough to send me this e-mail.
Couldn't you possibly, while you were there with your ancient gnarly claws on my account data, also have extracted my auto-pay status and congratulated me for being enrolled? Couldn't you have assured me that this e-mail was for my interest only and was being paid as usual?
Of course you could have. A trivial addition. Instead you make me wonder whether you have somehow dis-enrolled me as a sneaky way of tacking on a late charge? How can I find out? Then you give this:
Yeah, dial that number and wait around. Send an email. Sure. Or go to your generic website and try to pass the obstacle course to getting the information I need. That's what I did. I got through the obstacle course and verified that I'm in auto-pay and in fact owe nothing. Thanks for nothing, South Jersey Gas.
This is such an obvious thing. Maybe they're too small? It turns out that South Jersey Gas is a public company with $1.5 Billion in annual revenue and 1,100 employees. They serve 400,000 customers.
Maybe they're desperately searching for programmers? I looked at their job openings. No programmers. But there is a technical kind-of job that they're seriously looking to fill:
Yup, a complete b.s. job, whose only relevance is to produce reports and do things to make the bureaucrats in government agencies who wouldn't know a line of code if it bit them on the ear stay calm.
Here is the first sentence of the job description, which is followed by paragraphs of similar verbiage:
The role will be responsible for establishing appropriate Critical Access and SOD rule sets for different applications (Workday Financials and HCM, Oracle Customer Care & Billing (CC&B), Maximo and Hyperion), managing IT organizational policies and standards in support of legal and regulatory compliance needs, designing and testing general IT and organizational information security controls and interfacing with Internal Audit and business leaders to ensure that controls are designed and operating effectively.
Got it? I looked through the rest of the details, and nowhere was "common sense" or "assure at least moderate levels of customer respect" mentioned or even hinted at.
Conclusion
The South Jersey Gas e-mail bill notice is a hardly-worth-mentioning issue given the massive fails that these organizations regularly commit. But when you consider that auto-pay is a good thing for customers and for the gas company and that about 5 minutes of real work is all it would take to fix the problem, and you think back on the important, well-paid job they're advertising for, you realize that the software problem is wired into the system and that everyone whose opinion matters thinks things are fine.
Maybe they should buy software instead of building it? They do buy software. They can't handle that either. See this for a great example with links to more.
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