But tools are expensive, and you’d have to go through a whole exercise of deciding which one to buy, and that’d take AGES and, let’s face it, you’ve already got Excel haven’t you ?
I once replicated a part (just the part that applied to my budget) of our organisation’s finance package in Excel. It allowed me to find out why my budget never balanced and may have saved two guys in Stores from getting the sack for theft, which they weren’t committing.
I also created a nonlinear thermal transport model using it.
It’s the caffeine content that hastens inhibitions out the door whilst the 15% clambers into the control room. So efficient it has earned a number of sub standard nom de plumes: 'Wreck the Hoose Juice", “Commotion Lotion”, “Cumbernauld Rocket Fuel”. None of these have the finesse of Special Brews ‘Wiki Woo’ or Tennents Supers ‘Electric Soup’ - Perhaps the Buckie brigade are too pissed to be more creative?
In my line of work (credit risk models) you could easily knock up the maths in Excel.
The problem was that people then tweaked the model, so everyone had their own, different, copy. Then they (or the regulator du jour) wanted to know what a certain set of inputs were 6 weeks ago, or what the model was 6 years ago, you get the idea.
We suffered from that a lot. The tool was fine. But the people couldn’t resist screwing around with what you’d written.
Chris is right - in my particular line of business so much of what went on was ‘one man band’ stuff. And the one man, or occasionally woman, was usually not an IT professional. So we had to use the simplest everyday tools. We did try to keep the very few IT professionals that we had for the safety-critical stuff, but that work was rarely under heavy time pressure. And once complete it was locked. Hard.
Probably the organisation’s best IT folk worked over in Space Science where they wrote satellite instrument control software. The 8 or 9-digit project budgets (that’s the whole budget, not the IT) and ~10 year timescales allowed that. In fact they demanded it.
We use lots of databases especially for things like the software that has to calculate search and rescue plans, that has data sources from lots of agencies and systems that include satellite weather, wind speeds, tidal patterns and currents etc. It has to pull in lots of data very quickly, analyse it all and then overlay on maps.
We don’t use excel for any of them.
The only team that does use excel is finance and those fucking idiots take 6 months to approve the purchase of bog roll.
That surprises me a bit. Our finance people used Oracle and got PwC in to write their system for them. Management actively discouraged budget-holders like me from replicating it in Excel. If I wanted to know stuff then I should just look at the standard high-level reports or request a customised one which finance might produce in a few weeks if they reckoned it was justified.
It seems that during the system specification someone asked Stores whether they held any item costing more than £1000. They didn’t. So Stores transaction line charges were formatted to £VWX.YZ. Among the more expensive items was a large bottle of sulphur hexafluoride gas costing 600-odd quid. I bought these, a few times a year, generally two at a time. So the line charge was 1200-odd quid. Oracle (or something in an interface tool ?) stripped off the most significant digit to make the sum fit the predetermined format. So every few months my budget was inexplicably £1k up and Stores’ one was £1k down. This went on for more than half a year before I and my Excel mimic found it. The discrepancy between Stores’ stock and their accounted receipts looked like pilfering.
It was a long time ago - first half of the 1990’s. But let’s just say the process didn’t go smoothly. It ended up with our Chief Exec being hauled up in front of the Public Accounts Committee. In para 18 of their report a committee member notes, as he puts the boot into Sir Michael Scholar (the DTI’s man on the case, they being the government dept we reported to)
I want to leave one thought with Sir Michael. You are not a newcomer to the Committee of Public Accounts. You must know, as everybody else knows, that we see in this Committee not one, not two but dozens of cases where it seems every single introduction of a new computer system by the Civil Service is at the start an unmitigated disaster costing tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of millions of pounds …
There’s just something about computer systems and the public sector, it seems …
What’s that quote attributed to Einstein? ‘Repeating the same action and expecting different results is the definition of insanity’ (some words and their order may have been mangled)
More serendipity after Sam put on “Watchmen” [DC comics, not timepiece-wankers] tonight. If you’ve not seen it, the opening scenes feature a seemingly-preposterous districtwide mass riotous lynching of prosperous, professional blacks by racist whites in Tulsa OK, complete with police joining-in the mass-murder, looting of black homes and stores by whites, planes shooting and bombing residents, and the complete destruction of an entire city district!
Seems nobody knows how many died - probably many hundreds - nor even where most of them were buried. The district was razed to the ground and the land later appropriated by white developers, hundreds of businesses were lost forever, 1,500 homes burned and looted, 10,000 left homeless… Most who survived lost everything and were never properly compensated, the community disappeared, and no-one on either side spoke of it for decades to come…
The more of this stuff I stumble across, the more I understand why America is such a madly fucked-up place, but it sure has been airbrushed from the history my generation thinks it knows…
Nana Mouskouri has only had one functional vocal cord since birth, but still managed to gain entry to the Athens Conservatoire, Greece’s preeminent musical academy.
