The new regime

As the dust begins to settle in our Data Warehouse Service Center area, my Web applications (actually, former applications, since they've been outsourced) are starting to come to life again. Several projects have arisen in the past week: a desired server conversion, a need to automate outage bulletins, server-distributed temporary passwords to satisfy audit concerns, and strategic privacy's need to track people with certain database access.

This will be an interesting test of the new regime. I find the onshore Indian contractor, the primary focal point, is overworked and overburdened: continually in meetings and fighting production problems from his other applications. Everything sounds great in meetings, he will be right on top of things, promises to get with me "tomorrow" to go over details - and then I never hear from him. And oh, by the way, starting mid-June he'll be in India for three weeks on vacation.

Meanwhile, received a call from the Strategic Privacy point person yesterday. There's a big meeting next week concerning our process for requesting access to data and the security thereof. He had some questions on the process, and I'm one of the few people that understands in detail the end-to-end security system. I detailed everything for him, step-by-step, and identified particular problem points.

Is all this knowledge and understanding also available from the new Indian support team, he wondered. Well, no. If the program goes down, they can fix it; but the detailed business knowledge accumulated over the years - you guys got rid of that...remember?

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