Chapter 7. The Employee Zone

At one point in my career, I was working for a company that required its employees to file weekly time sheets outlining how much time they spent working on various projects. The system was DOS-based (this was in the early 1990s), slow, unintuitive, and prone to frequent crashes. One person in the entire organization really knew how to use it, and her time was monopolized by clueless engineers (like yours truly) who couldn't make the thing perform. It got to the point that time entry was given a project code of its own, to account for the time spent accounting for our time!

One area in which many otherwise good companies fall down is in the area of internal IT systems. Unlike an external Web site, internal systems are seldom seen by outsiders. The “if it ain't broke, don't fix it” mentality can become so entrenched that, unless the system stops working entirely (as many did during the Year 2000 watershed), it will never be upgraded.

Because internal users are a captive audience—and because monies spent on internal IT projects come directly out of the bottom line—the quality of internal systems is frequently not on par with that of production systems used by customers. The company's most experienced engineers are usually allocated to projects that bring in revenue, while less senior developers are tasked with building and maintaining systems that are truly critical to an organization's day-to-day operations.