IT Projects: Expert Witness, CIO, In-House Counsel & Litigation Forum

Why Systems Fail and Problems Sprout Anew!

Here's a very thoughtful "oldie but goodie" from 1980!!!  What do you think?  WSR

Commentary on the principles of "Systemantics"

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Review of the book. Systemantics; how systems work... and especially how they fail by John Gall. New York, Pocket Books, 1978

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Introduction

At last those concerned with social change have a basic textbook to explain why "things generally are indeed not working very well" despite our many efforts. As is remarked on the cover: "Have you ever wondered why the unsinkable Titanic sank... or the poor in India eat better bread than the rich in America... or hospital patients are blamed for not getting well... or why, in general, things that don't work badly don't work at all ?" Similar questions are of deep concern to those working in international organizations.

The author, John Gall, explains his point of departure in the following words:

"The religious person may blame it on. original sin. The historian may cite the force of trends such as population growth and industrialization. The sociologist offers reasons rooted in the peculiarities of human associations. Reformers blame it all on "the system", and propose new systems that would, they assert, guarantee a brave new world of justice, peace, and abundance. Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point- that their own system would work very well if only it were universally adopted.

IT security education continues to evolve

Previously appeared November 17, 2008

Posted by Dr. Gene Spafford

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Security&articleId=9120622&taxonomyId=17&pageNumber=2

November 17, 2008 (CSO) The majority of programs at colleges and universities around the country are certainly doing a good job of training people to go into positions in IT. In fact, we have a greater demand among employers for students than we have students to fill positions. That said, there are some areas where we lack students who graduate with the right amount of expertise and focus. IT security and cyber forensics are areas where we have a critical need for workers in the field.

Computer science has been undergoing a transition over the last few years in academia. We've gone from teaching fundamentals for construction and systems to focusing more on all the places where computing can make a difference. The transition has been more to concepts at higher levels, with languages and graphics and network computation, than we saw five years ago. Before, computer science was focused more on program solutions around individual host computers and only some distributed computation. Now we are seeing more and more with large scale networks, cloud computing,Google apps, just to name a few. The field is shifting in that direction.

The security implications of these things are not known, or are being dismissed. The companies pushing these solutions are more interested in the business case than in the possible negatives. For instance, there are some interesting issues related to privacy of information that is stored and calculated remotely -- companies that have access to that data may be able to use it in marketing, which means more profit for them. They aren't motivated to find new ways to protect it.