GRIPES

[nomadpete]

Thanks for filling in the gaps, OME.

I was only able to share my personal experience with it, coupled with anecdotes from a few others who worked in various government departments. End users and IT support crews were universally lacking compliments about it.

[pmccarthy]

I once reported on a company that spent more on Sap than the company was worth a few months later as it went into administration.

[old man emu]

I didn't mention that SAP has had to pay big fines after being caught out bribing government officials in several countries.

[Jerry_Atrick]

On 01/08/2020 at 5:52 AM, kgwilson said:

I was an IT professional for over 25 years and would have been sacked if I'd ever came up with anything like these State and Federal Government systems. I don't think they have ever heard of "User Acceptance Testing".

I started in 1983 and am still in solutuion delivery - and I wholeheartedly agree. I never worked on a SAP implementation (one of my regrets because it paid a f! lot more than anything I worked in until I moved into finance which was only 12 years ago.. but it still took a while to move to the rates SAP was paying). Though I did work for two "competitors" - Mincom (a Brissie outfit now owned by Hitachi under the banner of Hitachi ABB Power Grids) and Indus Inc (a then San Francisco based company producing the same type of software, but specialising in nuclear facilities - also now a part of Hitachi ABB Power Grids). With Indus, we would go into new non-nuclear clients after a failed SAP implementation costing them millions of US Dollars and implement successfully for less than a quarter of the SAP failed price and in half the time... because we had people who knew the business and the software. Note, Mincom and Indus were enterprise asset management systems, not enterprise resource planning systems.. the main difference was that there was no manufacturing nor sales functionality - it had design engineering, work management, health and safety as well as the other bits that ERP has (well, Indus didn't do finance... ).

 

As with any software, there are always bugs waiting to be found, but a lot of what is released today is just plain crap and would never be released when I was a developer (when at Indus in the late 90s, I transitioned to the business and was advising nuclear companies how to improve their engineering and maintenance practices, amongst others, using our software - was a cross between a management and functional consultant.. Think about it.. I have no formal engineering  or physics training!!!). Not too long ago, I led a software development team delivering market risk software... The test team reported a bug where the function was completely at odds with what was specified. In our daily call, I asked the software development lead what was going on because unit testing (where developers test their code rather than the whole system) should have identified it.. and they passed all their unit tests. His response was he read the spec but thought it was not how users would want to use that fuinction so designed his own version of the function. I asked him to walk me through the business process... he flunked to say the least...

 

Going back onto SAP - OME - that would not surprise me. I am lead to believe (so am not saying with certainty) that SAP was done for bribing a large Australian telecommunications company officials with Harley Davidsons or something.  I can't find anything on it on the internet (though I found this: https://www.brightworkresearch.com/sap/2019/12/the-brightwork-sap-bribery-tracker-per-country/). I know for a fact that large software companies with consulting divisions would often offer the key decision makers lucrative employment in their consulting division if their software was selected. Very common practice.. And in the days when jobs were largely advertised in newspaers, tuesday's "The Age" used to have half/full page spreads advertising for SAP at eye watering salaries... I heard (again, can't state for sure) a common tactic was to advertise false jobs to infuluence people to buy so it could bolster their CV and get them the big bucks...

 

I worked for a dot com (bomb) startup in San Francisco. The Vice President of supply chain was wanting me to buy Oracle Financials at something like USD$2M. At the time, Oracle Financials (now called something else) was a strong competitor to SAP and that spending that much before we had launched on something we could get for our needs our immediate needs for free as we already had a small package.. My stances was when we are turning over 10 times the cost, we will look at it. The VP was eventually fired (but we remain good friends) and he admitted to me sometime after his motivation was to get experience with it. As it turns out he didn't need it as he went on to develop a business that has made him a lot more than the few extra dollars an hour he would have got as an Oracle consultant.

 

My experience is that if a firm goes from a manual to an intgegrated system or from a non-integrated set of systems to an integrated system., there are real gains in terms of auotmation efficiency (i.e. redeployment/redundancies), customer service (internal or external customer service) and general efficiency - as well as operational costs of the systems and their support and miantenance. The marginal gains from going say from a a previous integrated product to a new one are I think too marginal for the cost (not only the cost of the vendors/consultants, but implementations chew up an enourmouus amount of internal resources). Even the cost of upgrading your current version to a new verison can outweigh the marginal benefit.

 

I know that SAP has bugs and some awkward ways of doing things (because the focus on the financial modules as the accountants are the ones who usually make the financial decision on integrated systems - their work management module, when I was in the industry, wasn't fit for a DIY person let alone a nuclear facility). But all software has bugs and idiosynchrsies - some are just waiting to be found. It doesn't defend releaseing software that is not generally fit for purpose, though.

Edited August 2, 2020 by Jerry_Atrick

[nomadpete]

Thanks, Jerry.

You have confirmed my fears about exploding costs of service delivery across the board. I've witnessed costly decisions made by half informed, inexperienced experts (in several big GOC's). It still makes me cringe when I've seen software stuffups (lack of asking end user what they need, poor user testing & debugging) have caused massive costs, usually passed on to consumers or taxpayers.

For instance, (not SAP related) during final testing of emergency shutdown of a new steam turbine (coal fired power station), the steam got dumped, the boilers shut down as expected,  but a glitch cut off oil flow. The bearings seized, and the momentum caused a 50,000hp steam turbine and attached generator rolled out through the wall.

After a lot of headscratching, a bug fix was made to the programme. Unfortunately it was not software tested prior implementation. Result? A second turbine exited through a wall when shutdown.

That was back in 1980-ish. Ever since, I've shuddered when a pro nuclear politician tells us "It's all safe - we'll use world's best practice automation!"

[Jerry_Atrick]

No worries.. What should really make you shudder is that there is probably still code I have written that is used by nukes! Admittedly, it is not SCADA, so that should be of some relief.. but it does control the maitenance and engineering of a plant.

[nomadpete]

I spent many late nights commissioning SCADA and switchyard control systems. Each logic level and cause / effect scenario was tested initially in a workshop by programming gurus, then in the field by field experts, then finally on the de-energised transformers and circuit breakers before actually going active by running real 330kv through the expensive bits. Countless pages of paper checklists were ticked off and verified before the stuff could be trusted.

 

 At the time, Politicians called it "gold plating the grid" but they forget how suddenly unpopular they would be if Brisbane suddenly went black for a couple of hours due to a untested software or logic error.

 

I didn't see your name anywhere, did you embed it in the code?

[kgwilson]

The marketers of SAP have probably done the best snow jobs of any software organisation in the world over the last 20 years or so. I would imagine that there have been numerous kickbacks and bribes to gain access to governments and large corporations around the world and once they have the contracts signed and implementation is underway any thought of extrication and going back or elsewhere is so convoluted and incredibly expensive that the only way is to cotininue.

 

In the 90s the company I worked for committed to Oracle as its RDBMS. These were relatively early days of "Relational Database Management Systems" and Oracle was at the forefront with Larry Ellison the CEO being one of the wealthiest people in the world at the time. The concept of RDBMS is like your brain where everything is linked to everything else except that retrieval should be instant . The problem is that there are things that are not perfect and when a curve ball is thrown there are roadblocks. These generally don't occur in the RDBMS core or kernal but in the application software written on top and in the user access software written for access via web based systems. In the 90s very few web based systems existed so it was Oracle applications where the user access was. It kept scores of anaysts and programmers busy with a well managed implementation and user acceptance process. The company was a $US8 billion enterprise with 10,000 employees.

 

I left to take over the IS/IT role at a company with 1200 employees with largely manual pocesses and basic financial systems on a mini computer with green screen access. After mergers and takeovers & the company expanding to 20,000 employees with $US15 billion revenue the company I left made the SAP decision. I never did find out who got the kickbacks but had my suspicions.

 

In the meantime I had a free reign to fully integrate an organisation from scratch. We created a network with fibre optics & PCs, worked with integrating SCADA systems with the ERP solution we chose, set up factory, QA, Laboratory & warehouse management with bar code RF systems and long range scanners and computers on forklifts etc & created interfaces with our suppliers & customers to eventually eliminate manual data entry from ordering to despatch. Siemens & Allen Bradley our PLC suppliers could not believe how we had been able to manage this.

 

Our business expanded from revenues of around $US30 million to $US500 million & in 2004 the company I'd left bought us. They were going to convert everything to run under the SAP umbrella. I was offered a role with the 20,000 but took redundancy & provided 6 months consultancy for the handover. By the time I left my wife had been living in our Noosa appartment for 4 months while I was in a bedsit in Hamilton NZ. In this 6 months no progess to SAP had been made at all and the decision was made to continue with the companies systems as they were for another few months until they could work it all out. 5 years later no progress had been made except that most of the manufacturing was moved to China & the NZ company downsized. 15 years later and the same systems are still operating. The integration into SAP was just too hard.

 

For years I was a member of DECUS, the Digital Equipment Corporation Users Society and at every annual conference there would be a bunch of new industry proverbs listed. One very simple and true one I've never forgotten is

 

"Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand"

[Jerry_Atrick]

Great synopsis of what you did - I am slightly envious to be honest.. I did some real time telemtry integration for a nuclear plant decommissioning into our EAM system that monitored readings and dispatched work orders and personnel when things didn't look right. It is still in use today, except that they upgraded the wired telemtry to wireless telemetry and brought me back to re-integrate because a) the company decided to was too expensive to keep their remaining experienced personnel and b) their so-called netowrk/IoT programmers couldn't work our the security protocol nor had they had any idea about integrating into an application that was based on RDBMS, even though that RDBMS provided well documented integration APIs.. The gripe I have of the iT inbdustry is that the "professionals" these days are so focused/specialised in one area, they really have no idea of where it all fits in, in the big scheme of things and consequently you get fragmented and cumbersome systems. Mind you, SAP was probably intentionally difficult because otherwise they wouldn't be able to build up a bulti-billion dollar cottage industry and as a result those in it want to preserve it and those not in it want to get in it.

 

Don't get me wrong, there are some fantastic technologists out there... doing wonderful things. Just look at the medical technoloigy field; aviation software (well, maybe overlook the B737-Max); space systems. under your bonnet, edge computing (Siri, Alexa, etc) and a lot of the smart stuff youi see today. Some of it is crap, but a lot of it is reaaly good engineering. But a lot of the more mainstream stuff is terrible.. I am not saying I was the bees knees by any stretch - there were far far better software engineers than me.. but there were also a lot of far far crappier ones, too... However, given I was self taught (no degree in anything.. and definitely no Computer Power Institute or whatever it was called), I did OK, though.

 

On RDBMS - I will take a little umbrage - Oracle (or Horracle, as I used to call it) post-dated DMS II (Unisys/Burroughs) and DB2 (IBM). In those days, properietary systems for commercial applications was king... I first worked with DMS II and then moved to DB2. Along came Unix, which basically did for the commercial hardware and operating systems what Microsoft did for personal computing.. Made it appear cheaper (it wasn't really - but that is another discussion) and opened up a new industry where hardware became  "heterogeneous", i.e. if you kept away from the likes of proprietary operating systems and ran Unix, you could run your software without modification (it would have to be recompiled, etc) on the new breed of hardware manufacturers.. so you were, at least in theory, no longer tied to a hardware vendor and could mix and match (again, in theory). It was eventually successful at driving down hardware prices, even for the likes of IBM.

 

Larry Ellison was more a clever strategist and businessman than a great RDBMS developer (BTW, not saying he wasn't a great developer).. He saw an opportunity - built a RDBMS for the Unix world as that was where he correctly foresaw where commercial computing was heading (he may have done it for DECs and maybe Tandems as well.. but I only know it for Unix). As the only real commercially available Unix RDBMS, it quickly grabbed about 100% of that market share.. Oracle charged an effin fortune for it, too. But I want to be clear.. he was not the father of RDBMS - Tedd Codd (well, I learn't today, Edgar Codd) was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_F._Codd. Larry Ellison worked for Codd, or at least in the team Codd worked in... But, as IBM was the largest compter company in the world and had about 70% of the commercial market, they weren't about to embrace this Unix thing (much like Microsoft didn't embrace Linux - but they have now - as has IBM). I started RDBMS work with DMS II (Burroughs), which was extremely fast and reliable.. Of course, it only ran on Burroughs - and it had a derivative of SQL (Sturctured Query Language - a common language across RDBMS system). I moved to DB2, which was slower but very robust and implemented SQL. But it only ran on IBM mainframes. I then moved to Oracle v6. It was slow, clunky, a lot of its features didn't work and some of its documented features were not even implemented (no, they weren't additionally priced add-ons). And it was expensive. Oracle at the time was, and remained for about 10 years, the RDBMS of choice - and over that period it improved remarkably to the most robust and fastest transactional (ATOMic) RDBS in the market. IBM moved DB2 to Unix/Linux, but by then, it was too late. I am not sure what happened to DMS II Or Burroughs (Ford were the only other big user in Aus I knew of). Since then, time has moved on; Unlike Microsoft, Oracle didn't keep reinventing itself, and it still has a decent RDBMS install base and reasonable ERP (they type of application SAP is) install base. These days, I don't even know why people use Oracle RDBMS; Postgres is an open source, free RDBMS, fully supported my MIT and is an Oracle "clone". The reality these days is that Postgres will come out with a new feature and Oracle will clone it. If you want to learn how to program RDBMS, download and install progress and read through their manual.

 

That is a lot of carp you didn't need to know.. So my other  gripe is this.. The IT industry, with the exception of hardware advances that lead to new APIs and GUIs, is a used car sales market. We went from third generation languages (3GLs) such as COBOL., Fortran, PL/1, , C/C++. etc. to 4GLs such as Natural, Pick, Foxpro, etc which as about declare what has to be done and the compilers would figure out the rest. With the advent of Object Oriented languages, we have gone back to 3GL (more like 2.5GL) and a bunch of cumbersome frameworks are trying to get the productivity gains we had achieved with 4GLs. One of my favourtie delivery estimation methodologies from when I worked at a majaor US bank was "Work out the plan (timeline/budget) to do it in COBOL  or C and add 20% for the newer languages). Not really progress.

 

12 hours ago, kgwilson said:

"Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand"

I love this.. A story for a separate thread, though.

Edited August 6, 2020 by Jerry_Atrick

[kgwilson]

I was a dyed in the wool DEC VMS man and didn't embrace Unix for quite some time. I began with VMS on DEC PDP 8s then 11s and then the VAX series and finally the DEC ALPHA. When our company built a new head office in the 80s the ground floor had a purpose built computer room with duplicate air conditioning systems, false floor with a large glass front so you could see all the disk stacks, processors, comms racks, printers, UPS etc & all the flashing LEDs. It looked very space age at the time. Prior to this the company had used a bureau and we did own some of the machines there but most were owned and managed by the bureau. The big VAX installed (can't remember the model No) was huge and had a massive 2 mb of memory.

 

DEC pioneered Ethernet and Decnet networking so we had company wide email albeit character based from the beginning of the 80s. DEC also created hardware clustering and RAID which everyone takes for granted now. DECs space was being quickly eroded by the rise of microcomputer technology and Unix. The final foray with the Alphaserver & its 64bit RISC architecture and VMS operating system was quickly eroded by the rise and rise of Unix open source. The Alphaserver running OpenVMS, Gembase with Oracle & SQLServer  databases with Renaissance CS ERP is still operating today more than 15 years after I took the redundancy path.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Great memories.. I did somework on the Dec Vax 11/780 and of course, the Alpha series. 2MB was more than enough in those days when programming for performance was a necesssity. I even worked on Prime 50 series (there is a name that not many people will know; Vic state government used them, as did AV Jennings Homes... Their hardware was quickly outdated, but their operating system is the best I have worked on).

 

15 minutes ago, kgwilson said:

the company had used a bureau

This is a perfect example of the rehash in the IT industry - in the 80s., Bureaus, in the 90s, bring it all back; in the 2000's, Outsourcing, in the 2010s, bring it all back in house.. About 2017 - it is now cloud computing... Guess what, apart from more services (which is what you would expect from an evolving industry), it is still bureau.. The US Navy has experienced why the cloud will eventually be dropped, too.. I can't find the article online, but from memory it was a material underestimate that put the cost not too far off the all in cost for using in house technology. While the cloud (AWS and Azure) is much better than predecessors, I still can't see, for large scale enterprise computing, how it is cheaper in the long run... I understand the theory, but practicality will likely be very different.

Edited August 7, 2020 by Jerry_Atrick

[kgwilson]

Just like companies when the in thing was to decentralise, then recentralise usually 2 - 3 times over a decade. We did that & also put Vaxes at all the factory sites which is something I project managed at the time. I had insulated container style prefabricated self contained computer rooms made complete with UPS , aircon, comms & power interfaces. They were set up, tested & trucked out & plonked on the factory sites next to the admin building & were fully operative on the same day. We trained the office staff to instal & replace the removable backup disk stacks every day. The DEC salesman made a killing out of that short lived project.

[red750]

For a number of years I worked on the operations side of things, starting out in nMelbourne, where I learned to operate the contraptions, then to Adelaide to assist a colleague set up a centre, and based on that eperience, went to Sydney to set up a centre on my own. Over a period of 5 years in Sydney, I guess I trained over a dozen guys, pretty much straight off the strreet, to operate the gear and run the centre on a 24 hour basis. The systems were Burroughs, initially B500s, then a B3500. The old line printers, 132 characters wide, used to regularly burn out circuit boards, leaving one of the 132 columns blank. Our centre was out towards the western suburbs at Burwood. The Burroughs techs would hate having to come out in the small hours to switch a circuit board. More often than not the night shift would have anothe customers machne in peices when we called. So they left a few boards in the cupboard and showed me how to identify the faulty one and replace it. We had the full bit - air conditioned room with false floor. Here are a few photos you might recognise. No, that's not me, it's from a Burroughs adevert, showing that there was more processing power in the small hand-held device than in the old machine he's leaning on.

 

   

 

These ones you probably won't recognise. They are of a cheque reader/sorter used by banks.

 

 

[willedoo]

1 hour ago, red750 said:

No, that's not me, it's from a Burroughs adevert,

He looks a bit like John Hewson.

[red750]

My gripe for the day is the crap shows we are forced to watch on TV during the lockdown. There is so much rubbish on at the moment, or you can watch non-stop football. Waste of time shows like -

The farmer wants a roo... (oops) wife.

The Bachelor

The Bachelorette

Australian Ninja

... and other similar garbage.

 

You get stuck with third and fourth repeats of Two and a Half Men, Big Bang Theory, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Golden Girls, The Beverley Hillbillies, The Addams Family, The Munsters, etc.

[Subria]

Red,our corrupt Govt wants sheeple in our society, ones that are simply mindless, that don't rock the boat, glued to rubbish TV & subservient etc, that's the way Australia is going!😞

I have several hobbies (outside of flyng), music, gardening (Acerage) RC toy planes/Heli's, a shed full of mechanical things to tinker with, I rarely watch TV. I've got a 50" plasma I bought new when they first came out a hundred years ago costing several $1000's and it's like new only covered in dust! 🙂

Edited August 14, 2020 by Subria

[Jerry_Atrick]

Doubt its the government per se.. will cost them too much in the long run with having to cough up for mental and physical health costs.. And didn't the government run the Life Be In It ads featuring Norm?

 

I think it is more likely the tech and gaming companies and TV companies themselves (though the reason you see even more car than you used to is it is harder for a TV broadcaster to make a buck these days.. so they will keep it as cheap as possible and appeal to the lowest common denominator - normally). And possibly the processed food and drinks companies that ply us with convenient crap..

 

Anecdotally, parents these days complain about how much they are carting their kids around to sports and other activities - certainly much more than I was a kid..

 

[nomadpete]

Jerry, your last point fails to remember that when I was a kid, few families in my suburb had a car (in my street, 3 out of 12 homes did), so if we kids had any sport we rode our bike to and from it. Which, apart from avoiding annoying our parents with taxi duty (which I did for my own kids), we probably benefitted from cycling exercise..

[old man emu]

I'm griping about either Australia Post or Australian Customs. I had a package that arrived  at Kingsford Smith from the USA at 6:00 pm on the 10th August. It has taken until 7:30 am 14th to get to a distribution centre somewhere in Sydney. I was happy with the speed that the parcel went from southern Illinois to Sydney, but I could have walked to Kingsford Smith and back in the time it took to go from the airport to the distribution facility.

 

I have another parcel from the States that took two days to get from Arizona to Los Angeles, then four days to leave LA. That was on the 10th. Can't find out where it is at the moment.

[Subria]

We have the worst internal postal service by far! 

A small parcel can take a week + to go 70 k's in Vict! 

2 weeks from a busy coastal NSW town to a country town in Vict, that's shameful!

[Jerry_Atrick]

Isn't 10% of the postage price for actually transporting the post and 90% for storage costs

 

@nomadpete - good point, which is probably one of the reasons obesity is higher in kids than previous generations.. But I still don't think it is the governments design.. rather entrepreneurs wanting to make money by providing goods that make your life more convenient.

[Yenn]

Of course our postal system is poor. In Gladstone we had a new postal sorting office built in the nineties. No sorting done their now. I I want to post a letter from one address in Gladstone to another in Gladstone. It goes in the box, picked up within 24 hours and transported to Rockhampton, sorted, sent back to Gladstone and hopefully delivered.

It wasn't perfect in the good old days. I had a letter from a lady in Gladstone, asking me to photograph her home for use in advertising it for sale. I went the very next day and she said why did I take so long. She had posted the letter 3 months earlier.

[red750]

I have parcels delivered from less than 10km away. They are clearly marked URGENT MEDICAL SUPPLIES. They can take up to three days to arrive. I could collect them in less than half an hour, but because of Covid-19 I'm not allowed to. The distribution centre is not open for collections, and under Stage 4 restrictions, I can't travel more than 5 km..

[facthunter]

With "Mania" in the name what can you expect? Devils island would be better and as for "VICTORIA" (named after a queen) comes QUEENS land. How many queens does one need?.

   South Australia? Well Melbourne is far south of any part of south Australia and WEST Australia want s to go further west. WE need states because Hey "THEY are doing it better than US so get off your bum' happens or you can move if that states doing it better. COMPETITION.THAT'S WHAT WE NEED. Perhaps even MORE states as some are too big in area but not people. State of confusion is not allowed. Rename all states. Dogs chosen people is not allowed. It's already been used. Nev

[old man emu]

One of my parcels left Tucson Arizona at 5:30 pm on 4th August, and left there the next morning. It got to Los Angeles on the 6th. It hung around in LA until the 10th then made its way to San Francisco to leave there on the 14th.

I expect that it has, or will touch down in Sydney today (15th), but also expect to be waiting a week or more for it to get the 60 Km from Mascot to my place.

 

The other parcel, from Illinois is holidaying somewhere in Australia.