Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
	Although I've never worked in the medical industry, I've worked on custom 
	vertical-market software.  This stereotypical cry of frustration, often 
	idealized into the anguished cry of the virtuous user against their 
	technocratic opressors, is equally often just a declaration of resistance to 
	change.
	
	"This software engineer knew nothing about how we do our jobs!" can really 
	mean "I knew how to do this job with yellow sticky notes, and the interface 
	doesn't remind me of the yellow sticky notes I know!"

It can also mean "This software engineer WASN'T ALLOWED to talk to users".

For what it's worth, my local GP's computer system flatly refuses to let
them spell my name correctly.  My name is "O'Keefe".  But their system
will not allow anything except letters in names.  So they try to enter
"OKeefe" which at least lets them get the capitalisation right.  But the
system knows that names have exactly one capital letter, at the front,
and won't let them do that either.  Whoever designed the software had not
taken the trouble to look at a telephone book.

Then there was the court case where I was an expert witness.  The software
was (a) 3 years late (it was supposed to take 6 months), (b) seriously
buggy, (c) atrociously slow, and (d) required the sales-clerk to enter
the same information on two screens because the designer KNEW that
purchase orders and invoices HAD to be different forms, even though the
customer had stated over and over and over again (with examples aplenty)
that their parent company required them to use a single form.

Then there's the electricity company (Contact Energy) that sent me, as
the bill for December 1999, a repeat of the May 1999 bill, whose computer
*would not let the customer service operator, or her supervisor, or his
supervisor, correct the mistake.

	Using technology to 
	improve one's job performance or enjoyment does not mean familiarity, it 
	doesn't mean that the software engineer ought to know exactly how the job 
	used to be done; in fact, if the net result of buying an expensive piece of 
	software is that the job gets done in exactly the same way it was done 
	before, but with a $1000 computer and $500 worth of software, why would 
	ANYONE buy business software?

Basic usability fact 1:  the people who make the purchase decisions are not
the people who have to use the software.

Basic usability fact 2:  the offical work processing rules the analyst is
told about are a fiction; the way things _really_ work is different.

Basic usability fact 3:  mistakes happen; it is important to have reasonable
facilities for correcting them.

A classic book on data quality estimates the proportion of bad fields in
real working commercial data bases as about 20%.  The figure for the NZ
Police computer system is apparently comparable.  Of course you can say
"operator error", but _why_ are operators making errors at such rates and
_why_ is it so hard to correct them?

	Of course, software in those situations is a 
	tool, and using a tool requires learning.  In my experience, a surprising 
	number of people are not interested in or actively resistant to learning.
	
Why _should_ someone be interested in a tool which was imposed on them?

	If the fellow who designed that "piece of crap" didn't know anything about 
	how they do their jobs, why did they buy the software?

See basic usability facts 1 and 2.

	I imagine it's not free.  If someone ELSE bought the software
	(not the RN you spoke to), perhaps there are different ideas
	about how an RN does, or should do, their job.
	
And it was the software vendor's job to find out which one best fits reality.

I was reading a book about quality recently (I'm really sorry I can't remember
whose, but perhaps someone will remember the anecdote).  The author claimed
that this really happened:

    Manager comes to tech support and asks for a laptop computer to take
    to a weekend conference.

    Technician explains that they're all out except for one, which needs
    repairs.

    Manager insists on having it anyway, then complains that it's too heavy.

    Light goes on in technician's head.  In manager's presence and with
    manager's informed consent, technician removes battery pack.

    Manager goes away satisfied.

Sometimes a computer is just an executive status symbol.