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Admin
The "reports were too frequent" part hits very close to home. Some times the users forget what they actually want: Excel.
Admin
These problems will always be with us. If I recall correctly, "The Psychology of Computer Programming" was written in the early 1970s and described an expensive system created without consulting the target users. In the end, the users just went back to doing things the old manual way. I realize that, very often, we have to tell users what it is they want. But sometimes it's important to pay attention to them in advance.
Admin
I am continually amused/frustrated by the number of people who insist on things (reports, notifications, etc.) having to be emailed to the recipients rather than those people seeing the information conveniently available in the system itself or some reporting system - when those same people either complain about how many emails they get, or we can see evidence of having hundreds or thousands of unread emails (thanks remote working and screen sharing!).
Or, even worse, when the insistent person is both senior and technophobic enough to have an EA to read their email and tell them about the important messages.
Admin
There existed a hardcopy report (weekly? this is back in the 1980s) that an office immediately threw into the trash can because the information was useless or superseded by other reports. However, we had to keep it “updated” (say, add/chg/del of business rules, headings for department names or personnel hierarchy), printed, and delivered because dropping the report might magically affect their data/operations.
Admin
Back in the mainframe days, the utility company I worked at employed those big, noisy IBM 1403 line printers. On his way into work, one of the operations managers at this site would press STOP on a printer, remove the most recently printed report from the stack of fan-folded pages, and carry said report to his office.
If no one came looking for the report, he reasoned, nobody needed it, and the job producing the report was removed from the data center's schedule.
Happened more often than you'd want to believe.
Admin
The solution is obvious. Replace the function with:
sendEmailToCEO();