February 10th, 2009

Preventing dashboard lust

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:25 am

Categories: CIO issues, IT issues, Salesforce.com, Tools

Tags: Dashboard, JP Seabury, Michael Krigsman

Many IT projects place too much emphasis on tools and technology rather than meeting user needs. When ROI and business case take a backseat to blind technology love, problems are bound to arise. Excessive dashboard lust offers a concrete example of this common situation.

JP Seabury’s Force Monkey blog describes what happened in his company after downloading Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Dashboard Pack 1.0. Although these comments refer specifically to Salesforce, the issue is not vendor specific:

Soon after [downloading the tool],…[m]anagers and executives looked forward to their daily, weekly and/or monthly Dashboard emails, and talked animatedly about them in the halls or at company meetings.

Yet something was wrong. I couldn’t quite place my finger on what it was, but the monster was there, elusive. The users asked for more dashboards, more pretty graphs, charts, tables, and I appeased them. Today, we have more than 50 different dashboards and hundreds of reports feeding those dashboards. It’s an absolute glut of information. And this monster I created now has a name: Data Admiration.

They come to the CRM tool, very excited about the volumes of data and information captured in our Salesforce Dashboards. They drink deep from the kool-aid. But none of these dashboards seem to drive any real change in the organization.

One commenter to that blog post put JP’s dashboard numbers into context:

Read the rest of this entry »

November 27th, 2007

ZDNet UK's list of top 10 IT failures

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:39 am

Categories: End-user impact, Financial impact, Government projects, Project failures

Tags: Software, Dell Computer Corp., Information Technology, Centre, Airbus, Electronic Data Systems Corp., Laptop Computer, Russians, Airbus A380, Tools & Techniques

As you might imagine, I’m a sucker for failure trivia. ZDnet UK has compiled a list of the top ten IT disasters of all time.

Although I question the inclusion of some items on the list, it’s worth a peek:

1. Faulty Soviet early warning system nearly causes WWIII (1983)

[It] happened back in 1983, and was the direct result of a software bug in the Soviet early warning system. The Russians’ system told them that the US had launched five ballistic missiles. However, the duty officer for the system, one Lt Col Stanislav Petrov, claims he had a “…funny feeling in my gut”, and reasoned if the US was really attacking they would launch more than five missiles.The trigger for the near apocalyptic disaster was traced to a fault in software that was supposed to filter out false missile detections caused by satellites picking up sunlight reflections off cloud-tops.

2. The AT&T network collapse (1990)

In 1990, 75 million phone calls across the US went unanswered after a single switch at one of AT&T’s 114 switching centres suffered a minor mechanical problem, which shut down the centre. When the centre came back up soon afterwards, it sent a message to other centres, which in turn caused them to trip and shut down and reset.

The culprit turned out to be an error in a single line of code — not hackers, as some claimed at the time — that had been added during a highly complex software upgrade.

3. The explosion of the Ariane 5 (1996)

In 1996, Europe’s newest and unmanned satellite-launching rocket, the Ariane 5, was intentionally blown up just seconds after taking off on its maiden flight from Kourou, French Guiana. The European Space Agency estimated that total development of Ariane 5 cost more than $8bn (£4bn). On board Ariane 5 was a $500m (£240m) set of four scientific satellites created to study how the Earth’s magnetic field interacts with Solar Winds.

According to a piece in the New York Times Magazine, the self-destruction was triggered by software trying to stuff “a 64-bit number into a 16-bit space”.

4. Airbus A380 suffers from incompatible software issues (2006)

The Airbus issue of 2006 highlighted a problem many companies can have with software: what happens when one program doesn’t talk to the another. In this case, the problem was caused by two halves of the same program, the CATIA software that is used to design and assemble one of the world’s largest aircraft, the Airbus A380.

Put simply, the German system used an out-of-date version of CATIA and the French system used the latest version. So when Airbus was bringing together two halves of the aircraft, the different software meant that the wiring on one did not match the wiring in the other. The cables could not meet up without being changed.

[Ed. note: To see my coverage of this failure, click here.]

5. Mars Climate Observer metric problem (1998)

[A] problem occurred when a navigation error caused the lander to fly too low in the atmosphere and it was destroyed.

What caused the error? A sub-contractor on the Nasa programme had used imperial units (as used in the US), rather than the Nasa-specified metric units (as used in Europe).

6. EDS and the Child Support Agency (2004)

Business services giant EDS waded in with this spectacular disaster, which assisted in the destruction of the Child Support Agency (CSA) and cost the taxpayer over a billion pounds.

EDS’s CS2 computer system somehow managed to overpay 1.9 million people and underpay around 700,000, partly because the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) decided to reform the CSA at the same time as bringing in CS2.

7. The two-digit year-2000 problem (1999/2000)

That the predictions of doom came to naught is irrelevant, as we’re not talking about the disaster that was averted, but the original disastrous decision to use and keep using for longer than was either necessary or prudent double digits for the date field in computer programs. A report by the House of Commons Library pegged the cost of fixing the bug at £400bn. And that is why the Millennium Bug deserves a place in the top 10.

8. When the laptops exploded (2006)

It all began simply, but certainly not quietly, when a laptop manufactured by Dell burst into flames at a trade show in Japan. There had been rumours of laptops catching fire, but the difference here was that the Dell laptop managed to do it in the full glare of publicity and video captured it in full colour.

It was an expensive issue for Dell to sort out. As a result of its investigation Dell decided that it would be prudent to recall and replace 4.1m laptop batteries.

9. Siemens and the passport system (1999)

It was the summer of 1999, and half a million British citizens were less than happy to discover that their new passports couldn’t be issued on time because the Passport Agency had brought in a new Siemens computer system without sufficiently testing it and training staff first.

10. LA Airport flights grounded (2007)

Some 17,000 planes were grounded at Los Angeles International Airport earlier this year because of a software problem. The problem that hit systems at United States Customs and Border Protection (USCBP) agency was a simple one caused in a piece of lowly, inexpensive equipment.

[Ed. note: To see my coverage of this failure, click here.]

August 23rd, 2007

Boeing virtual fence: $30 billion failure

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:58 pm

Categories: Government projects, Project failures

Tags: Boeing Co., U.S. Department Of Homeland Security, Fence, Michael Krigsman

The Department of Homeland Security “virtual fence” project, being built by Boeing, is in big, big trouble. The virtual fence is a high-tech network of cameras, lighting, sensors, and technology designed to intercept illegal border crossings. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Boeing Co. has changed the management of an electronic-surveillance project along the U.S.-Mexican border after falling more than two months behind schedule, marking the complications involved in setting up a new generation of border security.

The project, part of a larger Department of Homeland Security program called SBInet, is a critical link in the plan to use technology to monitor the borders for illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and possible terrorists. Towers set up along a stretch of the border near Nogales, Ariz., are supposed to use motion sensors, cameras and radar to keep track of wide areas. According to the government, Boeing has had trouble getting the different components to work together without glitches.

The government’s plans for monitoring as much as 6,000 miles of the Canadian and Mexican borders hinge on towers such as these working properly. If they prove ineffective, officials could be forced to spend billions of dollars for more traditional security measures, such as fences and more officers. The Homeland Security Department currently estimates that the virtual fence will cost about $8 billion through 2013, although the agency’s inspector general wrote last November that the cost could balloon to $30 billion.

Additional information can be found in a superb article by Joseph Richey, of the Nation Institute, which funds investigative journalism:

In Washington, U.S. Congressional representatives are already bristling at the skyrocketing costs of SBInet. Since Boeing won the contract last year, the estimated cost of securing the southwest border has gone from $2.5 billion to an estimated $8 billion just a few months later. When Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter asked SBInet Director Giddens for the real costs at a February 2007 hearing of the House of Representatives Oversight Committee, Giddens replied: “I wish I could answer that with greater clarity.”

At the same Congressional hearings, Boeing vice president and SBInet program manager, Jerry McElwee, took heat from Congressman William Lacy Clay who demanded information about the ballooning costs and the extension of the contract period. “You bid on these contracts and then you come back and say, ‘Oh we need more time. It costs more than twice as much.’ Are you gaming the taxpayers here? Or gaming DHS?” the Missouri Democrat asked.

DHS’s own inspector general, Richard Skinner, says that the Boeing contract is in the “high-risk” category for waste and abuse because of its scope, its dollar value, and “the vulnerabilities stemming from the lack of acquisition management capacity.”

A major concern is the pyramid-like management structure that critics say have led to cost overruns and poor quality in other major projects. They note that the multiple subcontracting tiers allow Boeing to exact a cut at every turn, and create a conflict of interest because the company is also in charge of oversight.

This failure has the potential to eventually rival the UK National Health Service disaster, known affectionately as the “greatest IT disaster in history.” It also brings back memories of the Airbus failure, in which multiple project segments failed to work when brought together as a finished unit.

The level of planning and coordination required to complete a project like this on time and budget almost defies human capability. Why don’t they break it down into smaller, simpler components, increasing the likelihood the thing can actually be built?

Update 9/10/07: DHS has another failure on its hands. Read about it here.

October 23rd, 2006

Airbus Crashes from Incompatible Software

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 3:49 pm

Categories: Project failures

Tags: Michael Krigsman

Buying the wrong software can significantly affect the health of even the largest company.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Christian Streiff, former CEO of Airbus. He was recently replaced due to delays on the company’s new flagship plane, stemming from a wrong software selection.

Carol Matlack describes this hard-to-believe situation in BusinessWeek:

It sounds too simple to be true. Airbus’ A380 megajet is now a full two years behind schedule—and the reason, CEO Christian Streiff admitted on Oct. 3, is that design software used at different Airbus factories wasn’t compatible. [Ed. note: on Oct. 10, Airbus announced that Louis Gallois is replacing Streiff as CEO.]

Early this year, when pre-assembled bundles containing hundreds of miles of cabin wiring were delivered from a German factory to the assembly line in France, workers discovered that the bundles, called harnesses, didn’t fit properly into the plane. Assembly slowed to a near-standstill, as workers tried to pull the bundles apart and re-thread them through the fuselage. Now Airbus will have to go back to the drawing board and redesign the wiring system.

It’s shaping up to be one of the costliest blunders in the history of commercial aerospace.

———————————- 

Airbus said, “The root cause of the problem is that the 3D digital mockup, which facilitates the design of the electrical harnesses’ installation, was implemented late and that the people working on it were in their learning curve.

Don’t kid yourself: this happened at Airbus and it can happen to you. Big IT crashes don’t just fall from the sky — they result when a chain of smaller causes come together and cascade into something larger. Moral: be careful at every step of the way. Yes, it sounds too simple, but the cause of this enormous IT project failure also sounds too simple.

 

[via Shayne Nelson]

—–