Thanks a million!

Thank you from the bottom of my heart! After almost 30 years, one of my wildest fantasies has finally come true. Thanks to our wonderful integrated management information system – IMIS to friends – I can at last read my payslip line by line instead of column by column. You have no idea how good that feels. Gone are the esoteric signs and incomprehensible codes; now at long last I know that my salary hasn’t changed for the past 20 years without even having to turn the page. It’s marvellous! I almost have the impression that I’m starting a new career with a new, dynamic and modern organisation.

Admittedly, this technical feat has taken more than ten years of hard work and a tad more than $50 million, against the $17 million originally budgeted. But a 200% overspend seems a small price to pay for the biggest stride in social progress since paid leave and the 35-hour working week.

As usual there are the cynics who are never satisfied, who say that there is now software on the market that can do the same thing as IMIS but 10 times cheaper and 10 times better. Others allege that IMIS is cumbersome and requires twice as much work as manual systems. And then there are those who claim that in January 2002 no one in Geneva could have money to travel or hire consultants simply because the figures that IMIS gave to New York differed from the ones in Geneva.

But all these people are sourpusses who don’t understand the joy of being able to read your payslip in the right sense and who, moreover, don’t know that according to international treaties you can’t kick people when they are down.

Jean Michel Jakobowicz, Editor-in-Chief