Yeah, I'm with caffeine.
Percy writes:
Why do we have this mess?
Doesn't sound to me like you're running into a problem with computers at all.
It sounds to me like you're running into a problem with stupid people.
It's probably variations of things like:
-actually stupid people
-lazy people
-people scared of editing "the data" and getting fired
-people not trained properly in their jobs (not stupid employees, but stupid managers...)
It's certainly not Liberty Mutual's fault.
In reading through your checklist, I think it's entirely Mutual's faut. It's their system. If they can't control it or keep it straight... that's their fault.
I'm encountering essentially the same issues at Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Merrill Edge, United Healthcare, Dartmouth-Hitchcock and AARP.
Sounds about right to me.
On average... it's rather difficult to find a group of 6 people without at least one of them being fairly stupid.
How large are these companies? Hundreds of people? Thousands of people? All trying to work together and one-up each other?
Sounds like a lot of room for stupidity.
I think the problem is endemic and affects all businesses and all departments of government, and I blame computers.
I think the problem is endemic to large groups of people coupled with poor focus of management, and I blame stupid people.
If people had to manage this interconnected mess of data we would never have created these complex data dependencies and relationships, but computers *can* manage them, so we create them. The only problem is, people still have to interact with this data, and people still have to explain to other people what is going on.
In a nutshell, the problem is more "the guy who thought up the software is unable to understand how someone will react to features if they did not think understand the entire system in the first place." (Granted, it's a difficult problem)
Add on restraints in time and money (limited resources for debugging) and some guy trying to show off that he's responsible for bringing the company into the new-age and you get... lots and lots of stupid.
T.S. Elliot writes:
"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."
I don't think it's the end of the world. I think it's just how people are and how we function.
I think it's always been like this.
When I was young, I always thought that at some point, somewhere... maybe important stuff like banks and mortgages... there would be a serious system that worked right with good people double-checking things and making sure it's right.
But, nope.
Or, at least, I haven't ran into any system that doesn't have *some* stupid people included in running it.
Obviously you've been patient and tried to work within the system.
Your choices are either to continue, or to take it up a hole, which, unfortunately, would be something like suing them or getting a lawyer involved or something like that. Sucks, but that's pretty much all we got.
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