Win Some Loose Some

I run a mini-call center for the State. We take calls of course regarding questions people might have regarding disability. Like any goof call center we have soft-ware which is supposed to track these communications with the end goal that when report time comes we can just type a couple of keys and get reports, charts and all kinds of information which can better explain to our funders what we do.

It’s a long, sad and woe some tale of the problems I have had in trying to either purchase software which will do this or build such software. This bureaucratic nightmare stretches over more then a decade (Remember the Y2K scare?) and has cost this little agency, my budget $1000.00’s. Five or Six years ago We purchased software from the local 211—information and referral agency. The director of that program wanted all the I&Rs throughout the state to use the same software which allow him and State programs to blend all of this information together so State leaders could write grants and produce beautiful reports with wonderfully hard data.

Over the four or five years since we purchased the soft ware we have had one glitch after another. The software was built on the Windows platform, which is good. I found out after I purchased the software the whole company consisted of two people-the person (Slick)we negotiated with for the purchase and the “behind the scene man” the guy who actually built the software(John). When ever I had questions bout the soft ware I had to go through Slick. Most of the questions I have had were questions I needed to speak to the developer of the software. But Slick would never let us speak with John for an appreciable length of time. On the few occasions we were able to either speak direct to John or have John physically visit our domain. Our problem was fixed in minutes. About six months ago slick left the Local United Way which made getting technical support way more difficult. In fact the last time I was able to corner Slick and ask for John to come over and help us find aa solution to a problem we were having Slick threatened us( kinda) by suggesting we were going t have to start paying for the tech support we were getting. Hey. I have no problem with that at least we would be able to get our needs met and our board satisfied.

Last month Slick and John’s old boss left the Food Bank and popped up as director at a United Way in a city to the North. I called Jodh this morning and was going over the problem and he advised me that John had gone to work at the same program as Slick had( big shock) and I could contact John direct. In less then five minutes I had john on the light and two minutes after that I had a solution to my long time software problem.

My information drought is now over I can run reports again, produce multi-colored diagrams and control my bureaucratic disteny. The only thing I cannot do is increase the amount of calls coming in…HELP!