Complex Rating demo. Adam on the (crap) speakerphone and can't really hear us. I think he got the idea he had done terribly but his demo was actually the most structured and useful thing in the three hours that some of us sat in that room. After he went off it was more "I dunnos" and "I'll find outs" but without the netmeeting demonstration in between.
The trouble with firing vast numbers of people and shutting down whole operations in other countries (US) or selling them (Hong Kong, Australia, etc.) is when people left behind get asked to look after a system they know nothing about it. Jaws did a fair job of talking about the SSBS billing system (ish) and we knew one or two things about PIRate (some sort of database that deals with the rates we bill at for different destinations/customers). But basically we sat there going, "erm yeah we should know that but I only really know one or two tables in that database." Someone has to find out but fact finding about the databases behind crap applications (almost certainly fed from Excel spreadsheets at some point) is not what I mean when I say, "my job is my hobby."
Intelligent Route Optimisation smells to me like a project that isn't going to go anywhere. Too many unknowns and vagaries. For God's sake the management objective for the project is only to put 80% of the rates into it. If the objective from CloudCuckooLand is 80% what will it look like on the ground?! Of course we did sit there with two people from a third-party vendor today so someone has put some money behind it and thinks it is really happening. They seemed fairly clueful so that's nice. You never know.
