Skipton is a town in North Yorkshire England.
Sneakernet is slang for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such as floppy disks between computers, rather than transmitting it over a computer network.
The company I worked for in the early 2000’s manufactured and sold adult diapers to hospitals and nursing homes. They were VC (Venture Capital) owned by a firm based in London. The three manufacturing sites were in California and North Carolina in the US, and Aneby Sweden distributing throughout Europe.
I was head of IT. We had survived the Y2K panic with not a single problem, and the conversion to the Euro which was much higher, but underappreciated risk. The Dot Com bubble had burst, but there was still a lot of optimism in the IT world.
In the UK, all healthcare procurement was through the NHS (National Health Service). And nurses held sway over the majority of the consumable purchasing decisions (including Nappies) for their patients. This made them the focus of the attention of our sales and marketing teams.
During this early and fertile era of software development, the sales and marketing folks came up with a brilliant plan. The NHS nurses had to manage their caseload manually. All of the details of symptoms and treatments, as well as prescriptions (including Nappies) had to be tracked on paper. This was by far the least favorite part of their job.
The solution? Our company would provide the software for free that would automate the Nurses’ caseload management with an emphasis on the procurement of consumable goods ordering, shipment, and delivery (including Nappies). Naturally, the software would recommend our brand first when Nappies were needed.
Skipton
The plan was wildly successful. However a problem arose. The sales and marketing folks had developed the software with no assistance from IT. They quite literally hired a friend of a friend who was working from his garage to code the software. As the software’s popularity exploded amongst the nurses, the one guy in a garage became a staff of 20 in a posh office in Skipton. We were spending hundreds of thousands a month to support the day to day processing of the transactions flowing through the software as well as manage the constant demand for fixes and enhancements.
The Board of directors, recognizing that the situation was out of control and we were spending way more that the uptick in business warranted, told the sales and marketing folks to bring the operation in-house. They tried. But in spite of our owning the code, the Skipton team said that due to its complexity and use of multiple systems, moving it to a new platform would break it and render it useless. Knowing that we were Skipton’s only customer, the Board was suspicious that this may not have been accurate.
I was asked to go to Skipton to assess. I took my two most senior technical people from California with me; my Oracle Applications DBA Scott, and my network architect Roger. None of the software titles in use at Skipton were familiar so we would be learning as we went.
The Skipton visit went well. The biggest surprise was in the klugey process where the orders were received in one system, then copied to a floppy disc and walked across the room where they were uploaded to another system for fulfillment processing, then another file was created and it too was written to a floppy and walked to a third system where the invoicing was generated.
“A kluge is a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain.”
But we had the entirety of the software loaded onto a single laptop and fully functional in three days. We took the rest of the week off and played tourist.
We set up our own team of technical and functional software people in South Hampton (5 not 20), where we created an new version of the software that was simplified, efficient and more easily supported. Skipton remained our vendor until we were ready for a transition to our new platform. In the meantime, Skipton began looking for addition customers to replace the revenue they would soon be losing from us.
Free Wine
Skipton (not their real name, but the real name of the town they were in) signed up a wine retailer who wanted a website by which to sell wine via the internet. This was a novel concept at the time. The development was a success and the website launch was a big hit. With one small problem. Think of ordering something from Amazon that costs $25.00. But you want four, not one, so you use the dropdown to change the quantity and you see the “Amount” increase from $25 to $100. Skipton’s wine website worked the same way. However, they left the “Amount” field user-maintenanceable. The buyer could change the total to any non-zero number with 1 Pound being the minimum. It took less than a week for a customer ordering a case of 12 bottles to notice this flaw. He told his friends. They told their friends. The wine company was thrilled with the number of cases of wine being ordered and shipped. But then the file that was sneakered to the invoicing system told the tale. The flaw was fixed, but not before tens of thousands of Pounds of wine was shipped nearly for free.
Wine company sued Skipton software company. Skipton software company went bankrupt due to the settlement.
While most of this chapter happened after we were no longer a customer, no longer dependent on the Skipton-based software company, Scott and Roger reminded me that we were in Skipton the day the wine merchant visited to tour the offices. We were practically locked in the office at the end of a hall to keep us away from this potential customer for fear we might share our opinion of the quality of their work.
