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Originally Posted by Phil^
I would urge you to moan at management for choosing these developers in the first place and suggest that they look into replacing the system entirely with something developed more professionally and perhaps even in-house ( and with contractual obligations to have a certain level of reliability ).
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Oh, don't worry I do continually raise these issues, but it's a huge cultural shift required inside the (quasi)public sector to not accept poor quality IT products/solutions generally. For our CRM product we made a request for keyboard shortcuts (in given contexts)
four years ago. It was put in the "development mix" (whatever that means) at the time and still nothing. We're certainly among the larger companies who use this product, but the suppliers (who predominantly deal with public sector software) know that we'll put up with it.
The other problem isn't really related to development but that 95% of the software we get pitched is basically already a finished product. The sales reps of course promise that it'll fit whatever peculiarity of your operations and can be tailored to do whatever, but unless you actually ensure this is the case before you place the order you tend to be left with whatever product and unless their agenda is improving the product in that direction anyway, you're stuffed.
(It's your taxes paying for hilarity like this btw)