Successful IT groups are resilient, flexible, and highly responsive to organizational business needs. For many CIOs, this goal appears elusive and completely disconnected from the daily grind of servers, users, downtime, and help desks. Despite the difficulty, CIO success depends on connecting the chaotic, often crisis-driven, IT environment to high-level strategic and business priorities that matter to the broader organization.Linking a tactical IT culture rooted in reaction and response to broader strategic goals is a worthy, if difficult, challenge, which requires understanding the areas of intersection between IT and the business. Despite the obstacles, IT must cross this bridge without disrupting its own operational ability to deliver projects on-time and within budget while still achieving planned scope. To be sure, this balancing act requires careful and delicate choreography!
How
are U.S. companies
reaching the determination that the resources in the offshore areas have
acquired the necessary level of expertise to fill management and application
development roles? Isn’t there a great risk here, to be compared to the
fairy tale where the two “ugly stepsisters” are attempting to jam their size 10’s
into Cinderella’s size 5 glass slipper, in order to win the grand prize, the
hand of Prince Charming in marriage? If they actually do it by force,
they will probably be too crippled to walk down the aisle with the
Prince! Have American companies done in-depth studies on the level of
offshore skills available, to be certain that they will not cripple their
businesses in the long run with staffing that is unable to “fit” the job?
This development has all the makings of a "fractured fairy tale".
We would like to have your insights and comments on this issue.
Marlene
Execs say firm
plans to start offshoring development, project management work
November 3, 2008 (Computerworld) IT workers and
managers who believe their jobs are at too high a level to be sent overseas may
want to look at Affiliated Computer Services Inc.'s plan to boost its offshore outsourcing operations by moving "more complex, higher paying"
jobs to countries outside the U.S.
Dallas-based ACS,
which provides IT and business process outsourcing services to a wide range of
corporate and government clients, currently employs about 63,000 people, 20,000
of them in low-cost offshore locations. But in a conference call last Thursday on its financial results for the quarter that ended
Sept. 30, ACS detailed plans to increase the number of employees working
offshore by 4,200 during its current fiscal year, which began July. (A transcript of the call can be read on Seeking Alpha Ltd.'s Web
site.)
"To have a
greater financial impact, we will be moving a higher percentage of more
complex, higher paying jobs offshore, including management and application
development roles," ACS President and CEO Lynn Blodgett said during the
call.
ACS has been
gradually shifting jobs to offshore and near-shore centers in the Philippines, Jamaica, Guatemala and India. In its 2006 fiscal year,
just under 25% of the company's workforce was based outside of the U.S. Now,
nearly 35% of its workers are overseas, according to a presentation used by ACS
officials during the conference call.
Tom Burlin, chief
operating officer at ACS, filled in some of the details about the jobs that
will be affected by the additional offshore moves. "We've done a great job
in moving base production-level jobs offshore but have decided," he said,
"to aggressively move more of our higher level jobs, like production managers, higher-level back-office functions and
higher-level development roles, to lower-cost locations."
The company said
the expected savings from offshoring will give ACS more money to invest in
areas such as sales, innovation and development of new products. "This is
the right thing to do and the right time to do it," Blodgett said.
"This investment will make us stronger, not only during this economic storm, but for years to come."
After reading this posting by Ms. Millard in Baseline, I realize it
would have been a good pick for last Friday's post - on Halloween, since it
sounds a lot scarier than ghost and goblins.
What - "...no adherence to security software development practices".
Egads, "unpatched Browsers" ...! Oh no, not "The Rise of
the Botnets"...! Suzy - don't go in there - don't open that----there
is malicious code behind that Web page!
So - how about sharing some of your scary Web Application stories with
us? Marlene
Originally appeared on 2008-10-29 by Elizabeth Millard
Software as a service may be on the rise, but so
are security threats targeted at loopholes in application code. Here are some
application security strategies from industry experts, with a closer look at
one area not generally associated with security and information technology
management--insurance.
As companies flock to software-as-a-service (SaaS)
and design their own Web-based applications to take advantage of an always-on
and always-accessible enterprise, they're also opening themselves to a
formidable security threat, many experts believe.
Web app security is already a major concern, notes
Ivan Arce, CTO of Core Security Technologies. Most enterprises have already
adopted the Web paradigm for many of their internal applications as well as
almost all of their external Internet presence, he states, creating an
environment where Web applications are a major technological component in
enterprise business processes.
"Unfortunately, most of the Web applications
already in deployment were developed with no consideration or adherence to
security software development practices," he says. "The result is
that for many years, Web applications have been plagued by design and
implementation bugs and became the low-hanging fruit for attackers."
Adding to the problem is the large amount of
unpatched browsers, which create an additional layer of insecurity that can be
exploited.
Gartner also listed the top 10 tech IT leaders to watch for 2009 - 2011. Watch for the list on Wednesday, Oct 29th. Marlene
This post was appeared previously on October 15th, 2008 Author: Larry Dignan
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=867
Gartner has
revised its 2009 IT budget prognostications, a move that isn’t surprising, but
the firm’s projections could be a lot worse.
Peter Sondergaard,
senior vice president of research at Gartner, outlined the research group’s new
projections in his opening keynote at the Gartner Symposium
ITxpo in Orlando
(all posts and the firm’s Twitter feed). Gartner’s opening
keynote is an analyst relay that is part sales pitch and part pep talk to urge
technology managers to innovate, manage through tough times and be aligned with
the business better.
The meat of the
talk, however, was the downturn. The upshot:
Gartner had expected budgets to grow 3.3
percent in 2009.
Now the most likely case is IT budget growth
of 2.3 percent to 0 percent;
The worst case is that IT budgets will be down
2.5 percent.
While Sondergaard
noted all of the gloom and doom, he said information technology execs are most
suited for this upheaval. Why? IT folks have already been through this–has
anyone really forgotten 2001 to 2003?
His overall
message is that IT has options. Sure, it would be silly to think that budgets
written two weeks ago are going to stick. As for overall technology spending,
financial services customers, the public sector, retail and manufacturing are
all likely to curb spending.
However,
Sondergaard said budgets aren’t likely to totally collapse. “IT is embedded in
your business now. You can’t invoice somebody without IT,” he said. Sondergaard
also noted that Western Europe has the worst
IT spending outlook, but Asia Pacific will still grow at a healthy clip. North America looks flattish.
The American National Standards
Institute (ANSI) and the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) recommend that CFOs engaged in an “overnight” merger and acquisition (as we see
occurring in our current financial climate) should spend the time to ask the
right questions to gain pertinent information from their technology team,
business managers, internal compliance officers, and corporate legal counsels,
as well as crisis management and PR teams. Marlene
New guide gives
CFOs 50 questions about cyberthreats to ask various department heads
October 20, 2008
(Computerworld)A good place for senior executives to start in
trying to understand their companies' financial exposure to cyberthreats is by
getting an overall assessment — not just from IT, but also from business units
and corporate operations such as the human resources, legal and public
relations departments.
That piece of
advice is contained in an information guide that the American National Standards
Institute (ANSI) and the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) jointly released
today in an effort to help high-level execs prepare for the financial
implications of possible cyberattacks.
But as fundamental
as that notion might seem, the guide says that the continued failure of chief
financial officers and other corporate executives to gather a multidimensional
view of IT
security threats often leaves companies dangerously unprepared for the
sometimes staggering
costs that can result when their systems are attacked.
The 40-page guide was
put together by a task force of risk management executives from more than
two-dozen organizations, including Carnegie Mellon University, IBM, insurers American International Group
(AIG) and State Farm Insurance, defense contractor Lockheed Martin and
consulting firms Booz Allen Hamilton and KPMG. The document lists a series of
50 questions that CFOs and other executives should be asking the leaders of
various internal groups, according to ANSI and the ISA.
The questions are
designed to elicit information that can help provide a more holistic picture of
a company's exposure to security threats, and the potential costs of either
ignoring or mitigating
those threats, said Ty Sagalow, president of product development at AIG's
general insurance group.
Sagalow, who led a
series of workshops that resulted in the new guide, said a lesson that the
participants quickly learned during the sessions was that "cybersecurity,
which has been traditionally viewed by some companies as an IT issue, is not
just an IT issue." Just like, he added, it isn't purely a legal or PR
issue.
As for the
possibility that some IT managers could view increased involvement in security
issues by other departments as encroaching on their turf, Sagalow and other
members of the task force said they don't expect that to be an issue. Many IT
departments already recognize that they're only part of the solution to
cybersecurity issues, said Edward Stull, a software architect at Direct
Computer Resources Inc. and chairman of an IT security best-practices group for
the InterNational Committee on Information Technology Standards.
According to
Sagalow, this is the first time that an effort is being made to provide CFOs,
who ultimately have to sign the checks for security investments, with a means
for better understanding the financial ramifications of cyberthreats.
Who among you
have been through a merger and acquisition deal “back in the day”, before the
current Wall Street meltdown? Any words
of wisdom to add to this article? Marlene
Weekend M&As
don't offer IT teams enough time to analyze security threats, competing systems
and integration synergies, or figure out how to consolidate enterprise
applications. But even in today's tumultuous financial landscape, IT needs to
ensure due diligence is done and make the deals work.
Mergers
and acquisitions are not usually quickie affairs. There's much thought given to
M&A synergies, cost savings and value creation. And in the gray zone
between "intent to purchase" and finalizing a merger or acquisition comes
the critical IT-related due diligence—that period where IT (and other) systems
are scrutinized, and buyers can decide to pull out because the company's a mess
or there's just too much risk involved.
But, of course,
these are not usual times.
The critical due
diligence process of examining the overall state of an organization's
enterprise IT systems—the infrastructure, applications, outsourcing deals and
vendor contracts in place—can take up to a week, according to industry
consultants.
Recently, however,
entire acquisition
deals in financial services have taken place over the course of one weekend. A
few of the biggest deals of late include: Bank of America
acquiring a desperate Merrill Lynch;
JPMorgan Chase buying a floundering Washington Mutual
(WaMu); and Wells Fargo besting Citigroup to purchase Wachovia.
These so-called
"shotgun" M&As are both a testament to the dire circumstances on
Wall Street and a test of CIOs' and their IT staffs' ability to analyze,
prioritize and integrate systems in a hurry.
"The shotgun
marriages are being arranged, the companies are at the altars, the ceremonies are
being held over the weekend, the ministers are various federal agencies, sort
of instructing companies about what they need to do and on what terms, and
there is no IT due diligence," says Tom Casey, a VP at Booz &
Company. "It's just not happening."
In M&As, the
Heat Is on IT
The prospect of
not vetting IT systems before a deal is scary: Unknown security threats and
vulnerabilities, and unsecured IT assets and Internet connections are just a
couple of the worries for the customers of Lumeta,
a network mapping and monitoring vendor, says CTO Michael Markulec. "You
can't secure what you can't manage," he says, "and you can't manage
what you don't know."
That type of
insight is even more important in financial services, since IT spend typically
is a hulking 15 percent of overall revenue, according to Casey, which is an
indication of the crucial role IT (and its security) plays in financial
institutions. "IT is the backbone of how these banks operate," he
adds, "and you're not going to get these major [M&A] synergies without
addressing the IT stuff."
When companies
give short shrift to scrutinizing IT systems, M&As become even riskier than
inherently they already are. M&As are tricky to get right even in
"normal" times with appropriate due diligence, and many don't return
the expected value. According to an August 2007 Boston Consulting Group study of more than 4,000 completed
mergers and acquisitions between 1992 and 2006, 58 percent of deals actually
destroyed value for acquirers, with a net loss of 1.2 percent for all
transactions.
Now, in these
crazy times, IT teams will be put to an even greater test to try to make these
deals work. CIOs and IT departments are tasked with assessing and, ultimately,
meshing together dissimilar systems that are expected to provide efficiencies
and savings—ASAP.
"One of the
key factors of very big integrations is the ability of IT to consolidate and
streamline the acquisition onto a single platform and gain significant cost
savings," CIO Tom Sanzone told CIO
in late 2007, when he was CIO of Credit Suisse. (Sanzone took over the top IT
spot at Merrill Lynch in 2008. See "Financial
Industry Mergers, Acquisitions and Meltdowns: What's in Store for IT Execs and
Staffers?" for more on his transition and fate in the new Bank of
America.)
"As the head
of IT," said Sanzone, who has been through several M&As, "I know
what would be expected of me, and that's certainly a type of pressure I have
felt."
But in a heated
M&A climate with little if any time for due diligence, pressure on IT
intensifies. The difficulty of ensuring smooth systems integration and careful
consolidation (with no surprises) is dialed up even more. Unfortunately, said
Barry Jaruzelski, VP and lead marketing officer at Booz Allen Hamilton, in the CIOarticle, companies "don't
realize just how hard and expensive it is to consolidate onto one
platform."
The ongoing chaos
on Wall Street could hold an upside for vendors of risk management
technologies and practices, as well as sellers of compliance management
products.
Analysts expect an
increased interest in these products from financial companies for competitive
reasons, and to comply with the new regulations that many predict are
inevitable following the meltdown.
One area many
agree is likely to see much greater interest is risk modeling and financial
risk management.
There are some
"core tenets" for effective risk management highlighted by the
current crisis, said Dave Hoag, director of clearing technology at
Chicago-based derivatives exchange CME Group.
The biggest of
them: the need for fair and transparent visibility into the models, data and
analytics that go into calculating the risk associated with different financial
transactions, Hoag said. Expect to see greater investment in risk management
technologies as companies seek, or are driven to, implement this greater
transparency in their risk calculation processes, he said.
Even though the
current problems on Wall Street have more to do with an absence of regulatory
oversight than with faulty risk-management practices, expect to see a greater
focus on accounting for risk at least for some time, said Glyn Holton, an
independent financial risk management consultant based in Boston.
"Financial risk
management makes a wonderful scapegoat [for the current crisis]," Holton
said. "This is a cycle we go through when we have losses. We trot out the
back-office risk management guys. There will be some more focus on
strengthening risk management, some technology will be purchased, and probably
monitoring will be increased."
Dennis Santiago,
CEO of professional services firm Institutional Risk Analytics, said the Wall
Street crisis has exposed some fundamental shortcomings in the risk-modeling
technologies and analytics being used currently.
"We have been
pretty much using the same tools now for a decade. One of the things that is
clearly beginning to show itself at this stage is that the techniques that
worked in the last business cycle for managing risk don't work as well
anymore," Santiago said.
No
surprise I'm sure to most of you out there that IT spending would be affected
by the country's economic downturn. But do you think that the IT world
will bear more of the brunt of the funding squeeze in businesses than some
other departments and areas? Let us know your thoughts and
suggestions.
Marlene
Deepening
economic gloom prompts consulting firm to reduce its IT spending forecast for
'09
The image of Franklin Roosevelt was among
those flashed on the screen during the opening session at Gartner Inc.'s Symposium/ITxpo 2008 conference here
today, as part of a parade of grim messages and recommendations from Gartner
analysts about the Wall
Street meltdown. The only piece of advice about the economic situation that
drew a hearty laugh from the IT managers in the crowd was this: "Don't buy
junk."
The No. 1 item on
Gartner's list of what IT execs have to prepare for was the worst of all, from
a manager's standpoint: hiring freezes and possibly
even layoffs. It was a somber message for the 6,000 attendees at the
conference.
"The next big
thing in IT is not a technology — it is cost reduction, risk
management and compliance," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's global
head of research.
Gartner, which
said in a report late last month that it didn't
expect a recession in tech spending, now is forecasting that overall
spending will grow 3% year over year during the current quarter and then increase
2.3% next year — a reduction from its previous projections. And the consulting
firm isn't ruling out IT budget cuts as deep as 20% at some businesses.
"This is no downturn; this is a crisis," Gartner analyst Whit Andrews said.
But what does all
this bad economic news mean, exactly? Other than Gartner's somber outlook on
possible staffing actions, much of the advice dispensed here was familiar, and
some of it has long
been on the radar of many IT managers who were in attendance. And it has
always been true that companies want to cut costs as well as expand their
technical capabilities.
Well, it will be interesting to see what other entities will be jumping on the bandwagon to voice either approval or disapproval of this proposed Google partnership/venture. Does affiliation with Google in this kind of deal really make more sense for Yahoo than the Microsoft bid they refused earlier this year? Any thoughts and comments from all of you out there? Marlene
The
Association of National Advertisers sent a letter objecting to the proposed
Internet search advertising partnership between Yahoo and Google to government
regulators reviewing the deal, the group said.
LOS ANGELES
(Reuters) - The Association of National Advertisers sent a letter objecting to
the proposed Internet search advertising partnership between Yahoo Inc and
Google Inc to government regulators reviewing the deal, the group said on
Sunday.
U.S.The letter to
Assistant Attorney General Thomas Barnett, noted that "a Google-Yahoo
partnership will control 90 percent of search advertising inventory," the
ANA, which represents major U.S.advertisers, said in a statement.
The partnership
"will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power,
limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers
for high quality,
affordable search advertising," the statement said.
Barnett could not
be reached for comment on Sunday.
"If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..." The
Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling of July 11, 2008 discussed here in
Byron's blog brought this old adage to mind. My analogy to the
packaged software issue being something like the fabled ugly duckling
that turned into the beautiful swan. The swan's beauty and appeal
required time for the "add ons" of its growth and maturity, while from
the get-go, a duck is a functioning package, including flying as well
as swimming, albeit not offering the aesthetics of a swan. What, if
any, import could this ruling have in litigation involving failed
software projects? Any thoughts?
Marlene Palmer, Consultant, WSR Consulting Group LLC
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/den/?p=132 Posted by Dennis Byron on August 4, 2008
In the dog days of August here on Cape Cod,
it’s harder to find something to write about regarding enterprise software on a
daily basis than it is to actually write it. It’s summertime and the living is
easy, blah blah blah. But not for bloggers.
My choices looked pretty bleak this morning as I scoured the Web for news
over the last few weeks while I was on vacation. Let’s see: Write my umpteenth
post about enterprise software being too expensive? Is enterprise software good
or bad for open source? Or I could write that enterprise software is doomed by
software as a service!
And then this
story from Wisconsin popped up and hit me across the forehead with
all the subtlety of a two-by-four at a stick-ball game.
No, I'm not going to say Vista. I see Vista as an organizational failure. Ballmer gets his share of the blame, but there's plenty of blame to go around. Now, Microhoo, the failed attempt to buy out Yahoo -- that heaping pile lands directly on Ballmer's doorstep.
Let me walk you through it. First, as we all know, Microsoft has been obsessed by Google. Ballmer is convinced that Google is The Enemy.
I've never quite understood this. Yes, in general terms, Google is the one technology company that Microsoft hasn't been able to beat into the ground. So what? Microsoft makes its billions from selling software. Google makes it mint from online advertising and the search engine that powers it.
Google, in its turn, has advanced into Microsoft territory with Google Apps. That's a more serious threat. I think online office suites will never completely break office suites that live on PCs. After all do you really want your important report's very creation to depend entirely on your Starbucks Wi-Fi connection? I don't. Google Apps is no Microsoft Office killer.
Because Mark Zuckerberg is barely in his mid-20s, his résumé is a bit thinner than others here. Well, except for his first job as founder and CEO of Facebook, perhaps the most explosively popular social-networking company ever and the most high-profile Web 2.0 start-up. Mr. Zuckerberg created Facebook in 2004, while still an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he studied computer science. He brought the company to Silicon Valley before he had a chance to graduate from college, but managed to get a $15 billion valuation for the company anyway.
Even if you saw this in print in the Wall Street Journal, you'll want to share the fun with "Bill & Steve" in this video! Also see Part One of this interview on this blog. Warren
Here are a few video highlights from the second half of the D6 interview of Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer, conducted by conference co-hosts Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. (Click here for highlights from the first half of the interview.)
Even if you saw this in print in today's Wall Street Journal, watch this video. What sense do you get seeing them visually? Warren
Here are a few video highlights from the first half of the D6 interview of Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer, conducted by conference co-hosts Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. (Click here for highlights from the second half of the interview.)
An attorney was suspended for three months by the Kansas Supreme Court for, among other things, failing to obtain a login name and password to comply with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court's e-filing requirements.1
The respondent-attorney attempted to file a bankruptcy case by submitting paper pleadings rather than e-filing. The bankruptcy court sent Respondent an order advising that petitions and other pleadings must be filed electronically. The court ordered Respondent to attend the required training, pass the examination, and obtain a login name and password within 30 days. Respondent failed to comply with the order.
In most companies, the policies and practices used to motivate the workforce were established with older generations, the traditionalists and baby boomers, in mind. However, the mind-sets of the younger generations, Generation Xers and millennials, are markedly different. IT leaders need to craft the cultures of their organizations to ensure that all technology workers have the highest motivation levels.
Traditionalists, born between 1900 and 1945, are comfortable with a command-and-control managerial style primarily because they believe it was effective in World War II.
Over half of silicon.com's CIO Jury panel believes integration issues are increasingly becoming a major obstacle to the successful implementation of complex ERP systems.
This comes after furniture chain MFI issued a profits warning after the botched rollout of an SAP-based supply chain system that led to customer orders being sent out incomplete; the problem will now cost £30m to correct.
Integration issues appear to have been the key to the problems, with SAP claiming there have been no issues with its software. We asked our CIO Jury if the complexity of integrating ERP systems is getting worse and hampering projects.
When failures happen, often the quality of the communication process
does not match the technical resources brought to bear to solve the
problem.
Here are seven key lessons to keep in mind when communicating an IT failure.
Have a communication plan in place and ready to go
All IT service delivery teams should maintain an active business
continuity or disaster recovery plan. The time to develop your
communications plan is not during the outage or service failure when
the entire organization if focused on dealing with the problem at hand.
Any credible continuity planning process should include the development
of canned messages and a communications playbook that can be used
during the failure. Does yours? If not, start the process of updating
it as soon as possible.
Direct Communication with your customers is the number one concern
Customers would much rather hear about a problem directly from you,
rather than from the media or discovering the problem themselves. If
you are experiencing a major service failure, let your customer base
know ASAP.
In this new millennium, it is still true that approximately 29% of all large-scale systems projects are successful, 53% are challenged (with average overruns of 84% in time, 56% in dollars and only providing 67% of the required functionality), and 18% are scrapped and written off altogether. Although these stats show a small improvement over the statistics from a decade ago, and even with all the reported advances in technology, methodology, and software development and implementation, this is a poor showing for the Information Technology Industry [Source: Standish Group “Chaos Reports”].
For the past 36 years I have been a computer systems consultant and computer crisis consultant, including 20 years as a large-scale systems project turnaround specialist and an expert witness in large-scale software and systems implementation failures in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. If I have learned anything, it is the following:
Virtually all systems failures stem from the same handful of root causes and lack of “-abilities” (e.g., cap-ability, respons-ibility, suit-ability, etc.). And this is true everywhere in the world!
All parties in a large scale systems or software project failure or dispute typically share some of the blame, but with some bearing much more blame than others for causing the failure(s) to happen, allowing them to happen, or being unaware that they are happening – with each party contributing anywhere from 0%-100% in each failure category.
Many, if not most, of the problems (sand their causes) could have been avoided, mitigated, or managed if the parties followed a few simple, but not easy, rules.
Putting in proper project policies, procedures, resources, monitoring metrics, tools, and project team communications to address these root cause areas could have either: (1) allowed the project to be successful in the first place if they were implemented and used from the outset of the project, (2) been used to turn around a runaway project midway if not originally implemented.
Alternatively, determining how and how much each party contributed to these root causes is extremely powerful in helping judges, juries, and arbitrators assess the comparative guilt of the parties in litigation or dispute resolution for failed systems.
I developed the chart below to summarize my findings regarding why systems and software projects fail. This chart has been published in several peer-reviewed scholarly journals with relatively few changes over the years because of the persistent applicability and relevance of these root cause failings through today.
Please send me your experiences and insights on Why Systems Fail -- and What to Do About it?
Trading on a major Asian stock exchange brought to a halt in Nov. 2005, reportedly due to an error in a system software upgrade. The problem was rectified and trading resumed later the same day.
May 2005 newspaper article reported that a major hybrid car manufacturer had to install a software fix on 20,000 vehicles due to problems with invalid engine warning lights & occasional stalling. In the article, an automotive software specialist indicated that the automobile industry spends $2 billion to $3 billion per year fixing software problems.
Media reports in Jan. 2005 detailed severe problems with a $170 million high-profile U.S. government IT systems project. Software testing was one of the five major problem areas according to a report of the commission reviewing the project. In March 2005 it was decided to scrap the entire project.
July 2004 newspapers reported that a new government welfare management system in Canada costing several hundred million dollars was unable to handle a simple benefits rate increase after being put into live operation. Reportedly the original contract allowed for only 6 weeks of acceptance testing and the system was never tested for its ability to handle a rate increase.
Millions of bank accounts were impacted by errors due to installation of inadequately tested software code in the transaction processing system of a major North American bank, according to mid-2004 news reports. Articles about the incident stated that it took two weeks to fix all the resulting errors, that additional problems resulted when the incident drew a large number of e-mail phishing attacks against the bank's customers, and that the total cost of the incident could exceed $100 million.
News reports in December of 2007 indicated that significant software
problems were continuing to occur in a new ERP payroll system for a large urban
school system. It was believed that more than 1/3 of employees received incorrect paychecks at various times since the new system went live in
January of that year, resulting in overpayments of $53 million, as well as
underpayments. An employees' union brought a lawsuit against the school system,
the cost of the ERP system was expected to rise by 40%, and the non-payroll part
of the ERP system was delayed. Inadequate testing reportedly contributed to the
problems.
In November of 2007 a regional government reportedly brought a multi-million
dollar lawsuit against a software services vendor, claiming that the vendor
'minimized quality' in delivering software for a large criminal justice
information system & the system did not meet requirements. The vendor also
sued its subcontractor...
In June of 2007 news reports claimed that software flaws in a popular online
stock-picking contest could be used to gain an unfair advantage in pursuit of
the game's large cash prizes. Outside investigators were called in and in July
the contest winner was announced. Reportedly the winner had previously been in
6th place, indicating that the top 5 contestants may have been disqualified.
... I got a chuckle
out of this story from Reuters UK today about a lawsuit filed against
IBM:
A small Japanese bank has slapped International Business Machines Corp
with a $107 million lawsuit, saying the technology giant failed to properly
deliver on a computer deal.
Suruga Bank, based in Shizuoka Prefecture west of Tokyo, hired IBM in
2004 to help overhaul its computer system, but later baulked [sic] at the
proposed changes.
“We are suing because we decided it would be difficult to implement the
system they suggested,” a spokesman for the bank said.
Kind of a dangerous precedent ... if this suit is successful,
don’t you think? ***************************
Here's a set of definitions to help you understand what those Checkpoint Reports are really telling you ![author(s) unknown]
Essentially complete It's half done. We predict... We hope to God! Risk is high, but within acceptable ranges of risk 100:1 odds, or with 10 times over budget using 10 times the people we said we'd employ. Potential show stopper. The team has updated their resumes. Serious but not insurmountable problems. It'll take a miracle... Basic agreement has been reached. The @##$%%'s won't even talk to us. Results are being quantified. We're massaging the numbers so they will agree with our conclusions. Task force to review. Seven people who are incompetent at their regular jobs have been loaned to the project Not well defined at this time. Nobody's even thought about it. Still analysing the requirements. See previous answer. Not well understood. Now that we've thought about it, we don't want to think about it anymore. Requires further analysis and management attention. Totally out of control! Results are promising Turned power on and no smoke detected -- this time... Elements will be phased in gradually as the software interface matures It's late! Unacceptable stretching-out of the time scale It's late! Still in the early phase of the learning curve New The requirement was changed and the programme concluded Cancelled Experiencing transient malfunctions Going wrong Conceptually configured in several variations Modified A structured interface with the government on an inter-departmental basis Money!
I hope this helps. Maybe you have some that we should add to the list. Tell us in your comments.
Every successful industry has them — Murphy's Laws of Computing (Source Unknown). Do these resonate with you? Which new ones would you like to add?
When computing, whatever happens, behave as though you meant it to happen.
When you get to the point where you really understand your computer, it's probably obsolete.
The first place to look for information is in the section of the manual where you least expect to find it.
When the going gets tough, upgrade.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite malfunction.
To err is human... to blame your computer for your mistakes is even more human, it is downright natural.
He who laughs last probably made a back-up.
If at first you do not succeed, blame your computer.
A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked just fine.
The number one cause of computer problems is computer solutions.
A computer program will always do what you tell it to do, but rarely what you want to do.
Do these resonate with you? Which new ones would you like to add? Send them to me and we will select the best and most original ones and create our own bloglist with your name ascribed to your winning entry!
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