EPISODE 17 The new Boss is keen to acquire knowledge. So keen that he wants a quick rundown on our content management system so he can avail himself of our copious workplace documentation. "WELL," I say, bracing myself for a long session, "first things first, you'll need to get a strong coffee." "Why?" "Because our CMS is a place where documents go to die." "Surely it can't be that-" "Oh, it's bad. So bad that no one will ever admit to being on the selection committee that purchased it." "Were you on it?" the Boss asks pointedly. "What, put an IT person onto a project to select an IT system to store the entirety of our electronic data? Why would you want to do that? No, a selection committee for a project of that importance needs to be made up of people unencumbered by the intellectual weights of reliability, safe data management, and backupability." "Backupability?" "You know what I mean. Anyway, a selection committee needs to focus on the big decisions – like the highlight color of tags – and how many different tag colors there are. And whether you can add colors. Then there's the avatar facility." "Avatar facility?" "Yeah, you know, so your avatar appears next to any document you upload. Apparently, it encourages people to contribute." "It doesn't sound all that ba-" "Oh, it's bad. It doesn't have a proper index, because it uses AI to create tags and keywords dynamically." "That sounds like a pretty good ide-" "Yeah. Though it regenerates those tags every night, based on keyword frequency and lazy theme frequency matching." "Lazy theme frequency?" "Yeah. Say I upload a bunch of documents, each discussing something of vital importance to senior management, like, I dunno, the decline of manila folders. AI runs through overnight and creates tags for manila and folders and then a theme keyword of stationery. "The next day, the PFY slaps in a news item about traffic jams in the Philippines. That night, AI will associate Manila with manila, surmizing it's a typo, associate stationary traffic with stationery for the same reason, and before you know it you're getting a 20-year-old travel expense form when you go to order staples." "Surely you can just correct that?" "It does it every night. And worse still, there's some all-encompassing word association going on inside it which means that if you delete the document, AI will retain the keyword and try and match it to the next 'best' document." "But surely you could tune AI?" "What for?" "To stop that happening." "Why would I want to stop that happening?" "I... to fix it." "No one wants us to fix it. Remember when I said it's where documents go to die?" "Yes, but..." "The staff love it. Say you've half-completed a report that was due a couple of weeks ago, and you're under the pump to deliver it. Just put it in the CMS and that's the end of the matter. No one's going to look for it." "At my former workplace we used to use ShareP-" "Don't say that word. Or the T word. It's worse than Candyman." "Why?" "Well, they have the 'prior art' when it comes to sending documents into Neverland. No, we're happy with our system, which is almost as good as one of those shredders that slices the paper up before chopping it up into confetti." "I don't think that senior management would accept that sort of syst-" "Senior management were the ones who asked for it! We make the system available to His Majesty's Revenue and Customs on a regular basis. It takes about three weeks to convert a forensic accountant into a mindless ghost watering invisible plants in a mental health facility." "It can't be that bad. I mean, why would we keep it – at a functional level, I mean?" "It did cost a lot of money." "How much money?" "No one knows. The original invoice is in the CMS." "Well, just download it." "We could, but you're pretty much guaranteed never to get served the same document twice." "What does that mean?" "Well, you know. There was a negotiation process. Lots of letters of engagement, counter-letters of engagement, example contract, pre-draft, draft, pre-pre-signing, pre-signing, amended, cross-amended, legally reviewed, counter-legally reviewed, signed in principle, signed, countersigned, amended countersigned, etc." "You said amended countersigned... but you didn't say amended signed." "No, I didn't, did I? Maybe that's not in the system, but then again, maybe it is. After you've downloaded 17 documents – all slightly different, some dated, some undated, definitely NOT added in chronological order – you'll start to feel like you're getting somewhere. Then you'll get the 18th document, which refers to another document you've never heard of, which supersedes all the documents thus far." "But surely you can find it?" "I don't want to find it," I reply. "But I want you to find it." "And I think you'll find I don't have to find it for you. It's in my contract." "And don't tell me, your contract is in the CMS?" "I put it there myself," I nod. BOFH: Previous episodes on The Register The Compleat BOFH Archives 95-99
