On: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

[shadowgovt]

I got to be a fly on the wall in an organization meeting where we realized our third-party UI vendor had no roadmap for internationalization.

That was an uncomfortable day. ;)

[Scoundreller → shadowgovt]

Heh, I know of a major health record software that can’t handle time zones. So the hospital system has its instances sharded that way.

Once you cross a time zone, your records are much harder to access.

[en-us → Scoundreller]

Is this the same major EHR vendor that tells its customers to shut the system down and go to backups during the DST fallback hour?

There were many potential patient safety issues due to mishandling of times during that hour and the suggestion to just use the backup worked because it happens at 1 AM when little is going on other than emergencies which simply have to to manage with read-only access during that time.

[Scoundreller → en-us]

No, but it is an interesting problem. If something is done every 4 hours at standard times, do you shift all standard times by an hour so it’s still every 4 hours or have a gap of 3 or 5 hours for that task.

I kinda like the idea of regular scheduled downtimes of stable systems, just for real experience on downtime procedures.