On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 6:39 AM, John Curran <[email protected]> wrote: ...... > Matthew - > > A typical example ..... > At this point, some number of requesters will abandon the process.
I can, for some values of understanding, understand this. But I think that is a failure by the requester, not ARIN, and we should not change ARIN because the requester wants it to be easy to do what they want to do, whenever they want to do it, however they want to do it. History/Background/Reasoning: At a previous $dayjob$, it took quite some time to pull together a change. We had legacy resources, and therefore no formal contract with ARIN. At one point, we needed to get the records accurate (for internal reasons, not due to M&A). Over the (10-15) years since the records had last been touched: * We (well, USPS) had changed our mailing address * We (well, PacBell) had changed our area code * We (well, the funding agency) had decided to change our organizational name * We (as part of the previous item) had "mostly" changed all the local business records, which meant there were few records under the old name * Everyone who was named on the original ARIN records had moved on, and contact to/by those individuals was not viable. * The only thing we had not done was relocate (but, of course, the mailing address change sort of suggested we might have). The issue was that since ARIN services were "free", and managed (really informally) out of the IT group, it had never occurred to the people in the business office (who coordinated all these changes with the local authorities, and the businesses that we had contracts with), and the local IT people did not choose to be bothered with updating records they did not have to update (things worked OK, why do anything?) ARIN, in my mind, quite legitimately looked at my request to update the records with some level of questioning. Sure, I wished ARIN had just taken my word for everything (I am an upstanding honest guy, trust me :-). Eventually, thanks to the excellent ARIN staff, we did manage to update our records, but it took a lot of elapsed time, and pulling together what documentation I could find was not (always) easy (and the business office people who had dealt with other contract updates and documentation at the time of the previous changes had also moved on. A query to the current staff went something like "What change of business documentation?") Whose "fault" was this? Actually, it was the IT departments staff informal processes for what should always have been a formal process for keeping the records accurate. Just like other business records. Now that we (well, they, I was surplussed) have a formal contract with ARIN (I also spent many many many hours regarding the LRSA, which consul eventually agreed was goodness) I suspect that they (the business office) will keep the business records more accurate should other changes occur. <soapbox> Any M&A, or organization changes, have a cost regarding business records, and it is incumbent on the organization to be prepared to pay that cost for changes. Updating ARIN records (and the cost of doing so) is no different, and should not have a special "out" just because it can be take time or the people involved did/do not want to invest that effort. The days of informal handshake number deals are (or should be) long over. Get over it, and do the (boring, painful, but necessary) work. </soapbox> Gary _______________________________________________ PPML You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List ([email protected]). Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at: http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml Please contact [email protected] if you experience any issues.
