Well, that was interesting. Yesterday afternoon I got to see how to create a form in the new information management system that is being written for the Judiciary. Unfortunately, it didn't go very well. Things started going down hill when the speaker tried to copy a form (in PDF format) to WordPerfect for editing. He chose "Select Table" from the Adobe Acrobat menu and then drew a box around the entire one page form. He then opened WordPerfect but when he tried to paste in the what he had highlighted he realized that he had not copied the data to the clipboard so there was nothing to paste in.
Okay, no problem, I've done that myself a time or two. So he highlighted everything again and copied it to the clipboard and then tried to paste it into WP. Unfortunately, nothing was displayed. We waited. And waited. But nothing. When something did finally copy over, it was the text from a previous copy. Sigh.
Okay, rather than trying to copy from PDF, lets start from the original WP file. So he copied the WP file (form diskette, yikes!) to a network drive and opened it for editing through the information management system. Once open, you insert database variables (pre-defined fields in the Oracle database being used). But after doing that, he couldn't do a merge between the template and the data to output the final form.
I think I overheard that the servers running the applications and/or the database had gone down. I don't know why. But servers crashing do not engender trust in this new system. Whatever happened, we were sent back to our offices.
I've used one other large scale, state-wide, centralized online system before. This was about 15 years ago. To this day, there are still severe bugs in the system that bring it down on a regular basis. The project went over budget. So many of the planned modules never got implemented (and apparently never will) thus making the system less helpful to the users. In addition, system performance is a joke during regular periods each month when many people are using the system (but not more than the system was supposedly designed to handle).
I seem to remember somewhere that the majority of the efforts to create large scale centralized information systems fail. And by fail, they mean completely and utterly unusable and you have to start over again. If this is true, there are many reasons why this occurs. Sometimes what is being computerized doesn't lend itself to automation. Sometimes the contractor chosen to write the application is not qualified to do so. Sometimes the software tools chosen to create the applications are inappropriate to the task. Sometimes not enough money is realistically budgeted for the task. Sometimes the infrastructure (network and servers) is not up to the task.
And sometimes, a centralized database is not the best way to go. Sometimes, its better to decentralize and distribute things while still being networked and being able to query the other databases/servers.
Oh well, today is the last of the three days (I hope) so we will see what what we will see.
Aloha!
