A call center in crisis and the bureaucracy that botched it
In this IT tale, the tech team discovers why their request for monitors was denied -- and where the money really went
Follow @ifw_otrDuring my years of working in IT, I've seen that too many times tech decisions are made by individuals lacking any common sense or knowledge of the situation. As a result, many of these decisions are the wrong ones.
I used to work as a project manager for a South American government agency, and I was in charge of programming. We had some tasks related to law enforcement and counterterrorism, which was an interesting position, but as was typical because it was a poor country, our biggest obstacle by far was lack of resources.
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For a while, the workstations in our call center had been causing us problems. Most of the equipment was pretty antiquated, and we kept fixing the problems, but one by one the monitors or PCs or phones would finally quit working -- beyond repair. Our call center was a major part of our operation, so it was imperative we keep it up and running, but none of the managers or government officers had given us any more resources to fix the problem, in spite of repeated pleas. We had even boiled our request down to our most desparate need: Monitors. Request denied.
One day, the problem finally came to a crisis point: All but one of the remaining monitors fizzled out, which meant that the call center was down to only one complete workstation. The call center traffic was rising and we couldn't keep up, so decided to take it offline temporarily out of respect to users.
We worked up the chain of command again, armed with reports and data and a plea for monitors. We kept getting passed around until we were sent to a top government agent. However, she could not meet us because she "was engaged in important technological matters." We hoped that the office gossip about the "important technological matter" wasn't true: that she was buying bunch of TV sets for her and other top-ranking officers for watching an upcoming soccer match in the office.
