October 8th, 2009

Workday, SaaS, and failure: 'A matter of trust'

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:00 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, End-user impact, Failure 2.0, IT issues, Project failures, Project success, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Vendor relationships

Tags: Customer, Workday, Outage, Naomi Bloom, Andrew McCarthy, Manjit, Manufacturing, Michael Krigsman

Software as a service (SaaS) vendor, Workday, which sells human resources applications, recently had a 15-hour outage, during which time its system was unavailable to customers. In an unusual twist, this post is about success and not failure.

Background. The story begins when I heard about the outage through an anonymous source. To learn more, I sent out this Twitter message:

Naomi Bloom, a top HR technology and service delivery expert, responded:

Following Naomi’s suggestion, I checked Workday’s blog for details:

[T]he network attached storage (NAS) device that stores operating system files for our production servers detected a corrupted node within a backup RAID array. Rather than simply log the error, which is what it is supposed to do, the NAS took itself off-line. It is ironic that the redundant backup to a system with built-in redundancy caused the failure.

This type of error should not have caused the array to go offline, but it did. The most important result is that our failover plans worked as expected. Within hours, all customers were live in our secondary datacenter with all their data intact.

Workday gets in touch. Two days later, Workday’s Communications Director, Andrew McCarthy, sent me an unsolicited invitation to discuss the outage, even though I previously never had contact with the company.

The note caught me off-guard because it’s the first and only time a vendor has reached out to me proactively following a failure. I’ve written almost 750 blog posts related to IT failure, and Andrew’s invitation is unique in my experience. Here’s the full text of that email:

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October 4th, 2009

Scholarly interest in IT failure and waste

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:44 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, Devil's Triangle, Financial impact, Governance, IT issues, Project failures

Tags: Information Technology, Failure, Strategy, Management, Michael Krigsman

The non-technical academic world has become interested in ethical issues surrounding IT failure and wasted resources. Previously, academics that focused on this set of problems generally came from an IT or project management background.

I’m thrilled the non-technical academic community is examining IT failure. Considering both public- and private-sector IT projects, the scope and magnitude of failure is huge.

On Monday, October 5, 2009, I’m giving a talk on this topic for the Center for Global Business Law & Ethics at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School in Boston. Professor Lydia Segal, who coordinated this program, is a top authority on cutting public and private sector waste. She therefore has a natural interest in this subject:

Ethical considerations demand that we turn our attention to areas in business where mismanagement may cause serious waste. Given the importance of IT to both business and society, there is opportunity for researchers to explore the roots of failure and to formulate directions for improvement.

I’ve embedded the presentation below. Please let me know what you think.

September 15th, 2009

'How I tweeted my way out of spinal surgery'

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 9:00 am

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, Collective intelligence, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, Financial impact, IT issues, Politics, Project failures

Tags: Patient, Hospital, Twitter Inc., Health Care, Surgery, Sarah Cortes, Packer Hospital, Transparency, Healthcare, E-mail

The post describes a failure that is significant in light of the ongoing national debate surrounding health care reform and economics. Beyond health care, the role of social networking makes this failure a valuable case study for the enterprise.

Technology consultant and blogger, Sarah Cortes, went by ambulance to Robert Packer Hospital, a facility located in rural Pennsylvania, after she suffered a serious spinal fracture. The story takes an unusual turn because Cortes says Twitter helped her escape from the clutches of hospital staff whom, she claims, tried to intimidate and coerce her into accepting unnecessary spinal surgery.

On her blog, Cortes writes that Packer, “tried numerous maneuvers over 48 hours to hold me there against my will.” She continues [bullet formatting added]:

[The] tactics included:

• Threats that my insurance would not pay any expenses if I did not accept their treatment. My bill was already in the many thousands of dollars, they informed me.
• Intimidation that if I did not stop resisting their treatment I could be paralyzed
• Impeding my communication with Boston doctors by needlessly limiting my phone access. Thank God for Twitter and iphones.

Cortes believes Packer wanted to perform the surgery to help boost its accreditation statistics. From Cortes’ blog:

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August 27th, 2009

CRM failure: An ounce of prevention

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:28 am

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, Devil's Triangle, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, Implementation, Project failures, Project strategy

Tags: CRM, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software, Michael Krigsman

This week I spoke at the CRM Evolution 2009 conference held in New York City. It’s a premier event in the CRM world, bringing together buyers, practitioners, vendors, analysts, and journalists.

My presentation explains underlying reasons why CRM projects do not achieve expected results and describes how to overcome these problems. I spoke at length about harnessing the “wisdom of crowds,” or collective intelligence, to improve software implementations.

Finally, the presentation explores risks inherent in the new world of Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM.

Take a look and let me know what you think!

July 17th, 2009

Friday madness: $23 quadrillion software glitch

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:30 am

Categories: IT issues, Project failures, Short takes

Tags: Software, Visa Inc., Software Glitch, Tools & Techniques, Financial Accounting, Financial Services, Management, Finance, Michael Krigsman

This tale of IT failure is so extreme as to be a joke, making it the perfect story for a mid-summer Friday.

A guy spends $1.94 on his prepaid VISA card and then receives a bill for $23,148,855,308,184,500. Making things worse, VISA also charged the poor fellow an additional $15 fee.

I kid you not, this is a true story. CNN describes what happened:

Josh Muszynski, 22, of Manchester, New Hampshire, was one Visa customer aghast to find the 17-digit charge on his bill. Adding insult to injury, he had also been hit with a $15 overdraft fee.

He next called Bank of America, the issuer of his Visa prepaid debit card. The bank kept him on hold for two hours, during which time he contemplated the impossibly bleak financial future that might await him. He also felt a stab of fear that he had saddled all his unborn grandchildren — and their grandchildren — with a lifetime of debt. “Down the generational line, nobody would have any money.”

Here’s a picture of the bill:

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June 15th, 2009

Pentagon kills $6.3 billion missile technology project

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:06 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Governance, Government projects, Project failures, Vendor relationships

Tags: Northrop Grumman Corp., Pentagon, Government, Supply Chain, Vertical Industries, Business Operations, Michael Krigsman

The Pentagon canceled Northrop Grumman’s Kinetic Energy Interceptor program amid accusations by Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, that the system’s design would not accomplish key military objectives.

It’s not an IT failure, per se, but certainly a great example of poor fit-to-purpose between technology and business requirements, leading to project abandonment and failure. Northrop Grumman had completed approximately $1.2 billion of work at the time of cancellation.

The Pentagon said it terminated the project for the “convenience of the government” and not because of problems with Northrop.

Northrop Grumman describes the system:

KEI is the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) element that is being designed to destroy enemy ballistic missiles during their boost and early midcourse phases of flight. It is also the first ballistic missile defense weapon system to be developed without the constraints of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Reuters said Gates stopped the program because:

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June 2nd, 2009

IBM: IT failure and social media disaster

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 9:26 am

Categories: CIO issues, Devil's Triangle, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, Government projects, IT issues, Project failures, Tools, Uncategorized

Tags: Consultant, Information Technology, Social Media, Customer, Twitter, IBM DB2, IBM Corp., Lois, Michael Krigsman

IBM’s recent DB2 fiasco in the Philippines is a textbook case of Devil’s Triangle relationships causing conflict between a technology provider, third-party consultants, and a customer.

• Related: IBM’s Devil’s Triangle: An enterprise software soap opera

Although the situation is interesting, I never expected it to bubble over onto Twitter, demonstrating poor social media practice in addition to vendor/consultant arrogance.

The Twitter connection began when I tweeted a general request seeking an expert to explain technical aspects of DB2. IBM’s customer, a Philippine government agency, raised questions about DB2’s suitability to task, making the technical aspect relevant:

A consultant with DB2 expertise re-tweeted my request. So far, so good:

An IBM DB2 executive responded with the implication my request was somehow wrong, unethical, or not straightforward. Yes, the tactic definitely caught my attention:

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May 29th, 2009

IBM's Devil's Triangle: An enterprise software soap opera

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 9:24 am

Categories: Devil's Triangle, Government projects, IT issues, Politics, Project failures, Uncategorized, Vendor relationships

Tags: IBM DB2, IBM Corp., Paul, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Michael Krigsman

IBM faces lawsuits and public embarrassment in the Philippines over a failed government project involving the company’s DB2 database product. The situation offers a textbook example of the Devil’s Triangle, and demonstrates the tensions and conflicts that arise between technology vendors, customers, and system integrators.

Background. The Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), a Philippine agency responsible for managing the pensions of government employees, installed DB2 in 2006. By early 2008, the system began showing signs of weakness. Local newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, describes what happened:

[GSIS chief legal counsel Estrella Elamparo] explained that the software started showing problems in early 2008, particularly in handling voluminous chunks of data.

“IBM upgraded its database system purportedly to enable it to handle unlimited volumes of data,” Elamparo said. “However, the reported upgrade only worsened the problem because instead of fixing the problem, the database began mishandling data and prevented the simultaneous use of data.”

The government threatened lawsuits in response, according to the paper:

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May 8th, 2009

Enterprise student laundry system fails

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:24 am

Categories: CIO issues, IT issues, Project failures

Tags: Machine, Display, Document Management, Financial Services, Networking, Enterprise Software, Software, Finance, Managerial Accounting, Michael Krigsman

Disclaimer: This story is based on unverified facts, so no parties are identified. Nonetheless, the situation remains interesting and instructive.

As part of a cost control and accounting implementation, a major European university installed networked laundry machines for students. Read on to see why this failure is destined for the record books.

Light-hearted technology failure website, the Daily WTF, describes the situation [edited]:

Step One: Your Laundry Account. Go to your nearest laundry, insert your card, and a receipt with your username and password will be printed. It didn’t take too long for the small box printing receipts to run out of paper, [so] students couldn’t do laundry.

Step Two: Login Fails. For the few lucky who were able to get a username and a password, the next step was to log in to a web-based system in order to prepay for using the laundry. For the user’s convenience, the username consisted of 20 uppercase letters and was case sensitive.

Step Three: Install the Required Updates. As the login problems spread frustration among the poor inhabitants, the university was helpful enough to compile a how-to guide for logging in [that] only worked in Internet Explorer. In addition, the helpful guide showed you how easy it was to install the required updates/patches on your computer needed to do your laundry. Slowly, the inhabitants were able to access their laundry accounts, except of course for Mac/Linux users.

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April 24th, 2009

Twelve large IT failures to remember

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 3:14 pm

Categories: News roundup, Project failures, Uncategorized

Tags:

IT failures are so common that it’s hard to pick out unique examples worth looking at in closer detail. I usually examine failures that are large, serve as good teaching examples, or demonstrate severe organizational hubris.

Although I question just how useful such lists actually are, their popularity can’t be denied. In that spirit, here’s a top-ten (well, twelve in this case) list from CIO Insight magazine. The related links refer to more in-depth blog posts I’ve written.

1. IBM’s Team for Texas Consolidation. The State of Texas partnered with IBM to consolidate data centers across the state. Service levels have dropped so low that many agencies gave IBM failing ratings and complained it was taking too long to perform routine tasks. What went wrong: Poor project requirements and a lowest-bidder vendor pick. RELATED: Texas gov. intercedes in failing IBM project
2. US 2010 Census Handheld Rollout. The ambitious plan to arm US Census Bureau employees with handheld computers to compile and transmit 2010 census information to headquarters was mostly scrapped after two years of work. What went wrong: Scope creep. RELATED: Billion-dollar IT failure at Census Bureau

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