It's just a pity the software developers..........
Don't have a clue how our industry works (Telecomms) and it's even more unfortunate that the functionailty of oure new bespoke provisioning system was specified by "managers" (who REALLY don't have a fucking clue!)
There were two drivers behind this decsision
1 - Get rid of the mainframe that runs our old provisioning system (you know, the one that works, the one that everyone knows how to use and the one that everyone knows how to "work around" to get it to work)
2 - Enable end to end automatic provisioning so my colleagues and I can be replaced by an order entry droid in the Czech republic, the system taking in the customer order and routing the circuit and applying the connections, raising tasks where they are needed etc.
So what do we have?
1 - The mainframe is still around for order entry and progression of orders because they couldnt interface the new provisioning system with the billing systems (although this "enhancement" is coming sometime in the future)
2 - The auto provisioning dream, well, as long as I have a hole in my arse it's never going to work because of the disparate network equipment manufacturers in our HUGE global network that even when they do all speak "TL1" don't quite speak the same dialect and the fact that the programmers and managers can't get their head round the fact that the system they have implemented is fundamentaly flawed.
Anyway, I'm quite happy, the system is now slower and more flakey than it used to be, autoprovisioning / routing is a dream that is nice to have but will never work so cheers to the managers who wrote the specs, i'll be in a job for a while me thinks
Anon - obviously :-)