A little tale of hilarity. This is a wonderful story that someone told me, that nicely illustrates the sheer lunacy of large corporations (I'd be a naive fool if I thought it was just C&W where this happened). Anyway:
A new web-based billing tool has been recently introduced and now customers on the right billing platform can get their bills via email. Its quick, its paperless and its very very popular with account managers and customers alike. Basically, its A Good Thing (tm). Now for the funny part - we have a large team (100+ people) of credit controllers, to chase customers for payment of the bill. So clearly, this team needs to know the status of the bill and the account before they call the customer. The web-based billing tool allows them to log in and view the current status of all of our customers, when they recieved the bill, any problems that occured, the email address the bill was delivered to etc etc. Fantastic, you would have thought - they can log in, and see all this, they don't need to call account managers or billing teams or anything. Except ...
... the manager of credit control has banned the team from using the web-based billing tool. No-one's really sure why, but the upshot of this is that credit control now have to call the billing analysts or billing support (neither of which they're officially allowed to do by the way) to find out when the bill was delivered, and what its current status is. This creates more work for the credit controllers, more work for the analysts and more work for the support teams. And all of these problems have already been solved, its just the team aren't allowed to use the solution
Sometimes real life actually is a Dilbert cartoon
