Perhaps. It certainly wouldn't have been me that had to live with it. It might have been hard to stop using it. To give some context this was a utility company

Perhaps. It certainly wouldn't have been me that had to live with it. It might have been hard to stop using it. To give some context this was a utility company. The gas pipes were consumer and commercial supply lines. You need to know where they are buried so people don't blow themselves up digging them up. It was safety critical. >> It was really quite depraved but it worked The baseline context for this, though, is a very error prone process. It was common for me to register a pipe in the technical specification (size depth etc) system and map that (by rekeying the handwritten ID) and accidentally pick a different location in the system for indicating connection of service to main pipes. You could have a service pipe (to someone's house) registered to a main in a completely different area. My script eliminated these types of errors. The other thing to note is it didn't change the underlying process. You could, and I did, check the underlying form fills (something I wouldn't bother doing when it took 6 times as long). I'm not trying to denigrate the individual here, he might have been doing his best given his knowledge and level of autonomy (he might also have been chickenshit) but as an organisation they let some value fall on the floor from an employee because they had no mechanism to capture and integrate it.