My employer decided to convert all of a certain class of our records from paper based files to digital. There were three immediate problems. Our company was not going to buy a generic system, but develop our own unique, tailored system. It was to be done on the cheap, with net savings for record keeping from Year 1. The guy in charge (let’s call him Genius) always (and I mean ALWAYS) thought he was the smartest guy in room. Believe me, he wasn’t.
Anyway, one of the girls I worked with took on the project on the condition that she could have the next July off for her wedding and honeymoon. She worked hard, and the project was actually making progress. One of her duties was passwords, none of which could be written anywhere because Genius knew this was ‘bad’. She periodically reminded Genius about the July wedding and he told her it’d be fine, but never signed off the paperwork. Come mid May, the project is WAY behind, mainly because Genius told management it could all be done in house at negligible cost, and Genius kept changing the design every time he read a new magazine article on IT. My friend was then told 6 weeks out from the Wedding that her leave was cancelled. The project took priority and she’d just have to reschedule her wedding, honeymoon, the works. Genius just could not see that this might be a problem. So she did her job, updated the passwords as required, never recording them anywhere, as required,……and resigned without notice the last day of June.
On her honeymoon she gets a frantic call from Genius demanding all the passwords. “Sorry, I don’t work there anymore “ click.
That’s why a decade later our company still has a few hundred electronic case files we can’t access.