The ridiculosity of it all... (A ridiculously long work post about IT crap)

I just got off the phone with a demonstration of an online benefits tool that the developers sounded so gleeful over and just made my head hurt.

I feel I should back up. When I worked for the dotcom in CA at some point, we signed up for an online benefits tool. I was heavily involved in the training and testing and the building of it for us. It was awesome. It was pricey but it was awesome. It had its issues, don't get me wrong, but compared to what I do now and compared to what we've been shown by my IT group, it was near perfection. New employees could go in and do their enrollments. Current employees who had status changes could go in and do their changes and then we also used it for open enrollment. See all the functionality? (Ok, I did have to pull a report from payroll to upload to the database which that part was easy but I also had to do a crappy email matching thing to put the email addresses into it which sucked)

Currently we use an Access 2000 database. (One reason to hate the evil empire, Stephen, their own upgrades don't work with some of their products. Publisher can be the same way.) The database (with well over 1200 employees) has crashed every other version of Access I've tried to open it with. (Access 2007 may be okay, I haven't worked too much with it.) For the past 2 years that I've been here, I've done triple entry around open enrollment time. I enter crap into the access database. I enter a new hire into the first database and then I enter them into the 2nd database (because each year we have to rebuild the new database completely) and then I enter them into stupidass datatel.

Last year we got serious about looking at online vendors. We want them to submit the applications to the carriers electronically. We want them to load the deductions into stupidass datatel. We want it all. We went out to bid. We found a company that was awesome. We got good references for them. We were ready to go and just waiting on budget approval. Our loathesome IT department convinced the people in charge of the purse strings that they could build it themselves. HA! It will never happen. BUT we did get one good thing out of it. They managed to hook the access front up to a sequel (I know that's wrong) back end and for open enrollment only they can load the deductions into stupidass datatel. I still manually enter people into Access. I still manually enter new hires and changes. So we've taken a teeny tiny babystep.

This is a hugeass back story to get to where I'm going which is that I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with stupidass datatel and they are building an online benefits tool. I know we're going to get stuck with this shite and that's what it is... shite! It will ONLY work for open enrollment. It will NOT communicate applications to vendors. AND It will require a whole bunch of codes to do what we currently do with about 8 codes. (For example... it will take 22 different code options to set up 1 person with a medical plan for them only.) Which would be fine if this system could work for everything... both new hires and changes and open enrollment. It won't so I'll have to use these 22 different codes just to set up 1 person with medical insurance. It is like I'm dying of thirst in the desert and someone throws me a grape. Ok that will help, but really an oasis would be much better.

Stephen, you want to teach me to build computery geeky softwarey things so I can build one? ;) That way I could be rich!