Of carts and horses

It would be one thing if this had been an isolated incident. This kind of thing happens all the time, though.

At work, there's a database that my coworkers and I need to search from time to time. We access it by running a query in a program called Access. The business' IT team doesn't support Access anymore, so they're phasing out all of the Access-based tools and lookups. Makes sense so far. There are a lot of IT initiatives happening around my team right now, and among them is a program to convert all of our Access lookups to another program. Thus, yesterday afternoon they got rid of the query tool we used to search this particular database. Thing is, there's a slight problem with the replacement..... it doesn't exist. Or, at least, it hasn't been shared with us yet. Since about noon yesterday, we've had no Access, which means we've had no access. We need this database, pretty much every day (not all of us every day, but at least one of us). We can't do the pieces of our work that require it otherwise. Day and a half.

When we found out our tool was removed and not replaced, one of my coworkers said, "It's like putting the cart before the horse."

I replied, "It's more like putting the cart... where the hell's the horse?!? We have no horse. You see a horse, you let me know."

It's been a frustration of mine for as long as I've worked for this company (just over 5 years). Every single, solitary time they do an IT initiative like this, it's the same. The details change, of course, but the theme is the same. They're done at a management level. They're budgeted, designed, built, tested and implemented without nearly enough (sometimes not any at all) input from, or consideration of the actual needs of, the end users --- the day-to-day, hands-on-a-keyboard movements and tasks of those of us who have to operate these tools. Management wants X (in this case, no Access, and a new program), and IT delivers what is asked of them (the Access tool is gone, and it will most certainly be replaced by the new program). I'm sure from management's and IT's perspective's, this has all been wildly successful. Maybe I shouldn't put IT on an equal footing in that sentence. They're given a project to complete, in a particular manner, and they do it. The problem is with how they're told to do it. So I guess I should edit that to say I'm sure management will consider this wildly successful.

I'll have plenty of time to congratulate them, since I won't be losing all that time I previously spent doing my damn job.