Busy times and Rubbish Developers

Wow. Life got busy.

One minute we were Majendi, happily servicing our projects and keeping our heads down in the recession. Then BANG, we merged with RittmanMead, three new clients in a week, a conference to attend, a presentation to write, and some new admin to learn. I had the spring series final two weekends in the SB3, and the kids were sailing their Optimists in North Wales one weekend, then Weymouth the next.
The rib broke down, the dishwasher failed and this morning the hot water system failed.
I also have to get a new laptop, this time a MAC.

May is going to be a very expensive month!.

ON the client side we are having lots of fun with Essbase and OBIEE (I hate ragged hierarchies), as well as installing BI Apps on a Solaris 10 machine without the use of a windows box - Don't try that at home kids!

We have one client who are using a large integrator that doesn't know how to run a report on two separate subject areas so I will blog on the RM site to show them how. I just need to find 10 minutes spare time.

I have a contact at Oracle who asked me the other day for a sample database, in ACCESS - I laughed!

I also had another consultancy send me an rpd they struggled with. When I opened it I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Laugh because it was a complete mess and showed a complete lack of understanding on OBIEE, cry because people are giving OBIEE a bad name by poor implementations.

That reminds me , One project I know of is looking to replace it's Siebel Analytics system, they want something more flexible and quicker to create reports than they currently have. The reason for replacing it is obviously because they badly customised it in the first place and are using cheap offshore resources that don't know how to configure so take a long time to produce bad code. This customer is suffering from cutting costs and going for the cheapest offer for development. It is now costing them a fortune to buy new software, train users etc, but they are still using the same cheap outsources, so the result will be the same poor quality reporting system.

Consultancies, I urge you to get your people trained properly and stop undermining the product reputation.
Oracle, get a properly managed accreditation system in place before the amateurs ruin your product sales.
Clients, check out the experience of the people implementing your system and do not accept poor quality - don't pay them when they deliver rubbish.

However tempting it is to cut costs, we will never set up an Overseas development centre just because it is cheap. And we will only ever employ experts. If you are expert already, and probably blog your knowledge then we would love to talk to you