OHIM - for Princes and Princesses alike. - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso EUIPO

OHIM is an EU bureaucracy staffed by a wide variety of nationalities who are all ex-patriate for a number of years, and as such it has become an inward looking closed-community with unstated but entrenched attitudes of group-think. Contract staff are not paid top rates - OHIM relies on the attractiveness of the location to compensate for lower rates - and as such are of variable quality: good people come for short periods, less good people stay. Corporate culture is antagonistic. People in middle and senior management positions should read and work according to The Prince (Machiavelli): everything is a turf war and business interests are secondary to career advancement and the elimination of the competition. One succeeds by making the boss look good; if that which is right or good conflicts with creating a good appearance, concentrate on appearances. To illustrate the weakness of the culture, consider that some directors will not speak to anyone of a lower level outside their own department, as this would either demean them. The fundamental problem is that of many government bureaucracies: the inability to dispense with tenured staff who cannot or will not evolve. Since OHIM funds itself from the revenues obtained by processing trademark registrations, designs etc. it has far too much money to play with: millions are easily wasted on software development and other activities that are ill-conceived, poorly motivated, badly specified and casually implemented, but this is of little concern to management, though those who pay for its services may care to reflect on how much cheaper they would be if it were run efficiently in their interests rather than in the OHIM's and its bureaucrats' interests. OHIM has attempted to revitalise itself - to a limited extent - by bringing in outsiders but they either assimilate, or they are sidelined or dispensed with. Problems are rarely solved, problematic situations are simply massaged into other forms that allow them to be considered avoided or eliminated because they are no longer recognisable as their former selves. OHIM's IT systems remain fragmented and are very poorly implemented: witness the introduction of the "OHIM 2" website which received much UX attention but so little attention to capabilities and testing that it took 6 months from "go live" before the system was what it should have been in the first place, during which time, especially the first few months, great swathes of functionality were broken and clients were loudly aggrieved. There is a clear preference for fire-fighting rather than fire-prevention. Despite capable project and programme managers, most projects are effectively sabotaged by poor practices (though a few with the freedom to to things their own way may buck the trend). The President, Antonio Campinos was recently reappointed for a second 5 year term, though whether that was supposedly a reward because he was perceived as having done a great job or punishment for the website etc. is a matter for debate.