Imagine every mistake you can make with a new software rollout... There is not a sysadmin in the world who has not had to deal with a botched software rollout; for most, it is a coming-of-age experience. But few are likely to have made quite as many mistakes as the people behind the Alameda court system's new software. They have managed a rollout so inept that it should serve as a case study …
I work in a court in Northern California (albeit not Alameda). This article tells you why most government IT projects are in Epic Fail mode.
Court clerks were neither sufficiently consulted nor were they adequately trained on the system...
There you go, folks. You see, the high-ups know EVERYTHING. The peons know NOTHING. Well, they do ask them to write something up, sometimes. But NEVER NEVER NEVER do they let the actual workers see prototypes or ask them if something will actually DO THE JOB. Nope. They, in their infinite wisdom, simply have the system built according to whatever fancies they have relating to what the working classes do all day, then dump that system on the workers, leaving them to sort out the total omnishambles management has once again created.
</rant> Okay, sorry for the rant, but been there, done that, got the T-shirt and wear the scars. And it's about to happen to us AGAIN where I am. The last time this happened, we had clerks crying because they couldn't even figure out how to do something that took them 5 minutes on the old system. I'm stocking up on tissues. I hear the ominous rumble of an approaching train wreck.
Perhaps in some alternative reality, management actually consults the actual people who do all the work. Maybe they show them designs and let them have useful input at all stages of development. But not here. Never gonna happen 'cause PHBs.
Sadly, it's just not the public sector. But I sense your pain.
I know of case where a company spent $240 Million and got bumpkis. Damn near took the company down. They did have focus groups of users however, the contractor still did it their way with a wink, wink of the IT Director's eye since his wife was on the board of the contracting firm. So much money was also wasted on focus groups, hiring of trainers (lots... and lots of trainers) since it was the major system internal to the company. Oh.. and the mainframes would all go away and be replaced by wonderful server farms. Big dollars on hardware.
If the system had gone live to the whole company instead of just one area, the staff size would have needed to be doubled because of the slowness, latency, and the UI. Instead of a couple of mouse clicks... hot keys (dozens of them), keyboard inputs (dozens more usually of the same data already entered). But hey, one of the selling points was the employees wouldn't need to use mice.. except for anything outside of that system. Being Windows based... no mouse would have been a folly. The project rapidly spiraled out of control with 100's of offshore contractors coming to the company spaces and spending all day calling home to the sub continent and drinking tea since they had not been told what their job was or they needed to do each day/week.
Needless to say, no one got fired, No one was charged with fiduciary culpability. The IT Director went on to bigger and better things. The mainframes are still there as is the server farm that's mostly been cannibalized for other projects. What is new is basically a screen scraper to format the mainframe data to something that's standardized for all departments at far less money. Oh,... the company is smaller now in the number of employees as this system is faster and needed less redundancy is employees.
> "Perhaps in some alternative reality, management actually consults the actual people who do all the work. Maybe they show them designs and let them have useful input at all stages of development."
Conversely, in other organisations, there is an IT department which involves the end-users in system specification, design, and implementation, and they're complaining that their being involved in this is apparently a waste of their time, and something IT should be able to sort out without bothering them. </facepalm>
I find that it is a perceived transfI find that it is a perceived transfer of responsibility that can be responsible for the lack of user engagement. If they don’t engage, then nothing is their fault and if they don’t have to do anything new such as push a button that someone else use to push for them, then they are not responsible for what happens either.er of responsibility that can be
Conversely, in other organisations, there is an IT department which involves the end-users in system specification, design, and implementation, and they're complaining that their being involved in this is apparently a waste of their time, and something IT should be able to sort out without bothering them. </facepalm>
I think this is a serious and unfair misrepresentation of what happens..
The end users do complain about being involved, but often come around. They then assign you the worst person on their team, who usually cripples their productivity as they need one person to watch what they are doing and another to fix the fuckups. They do this to gain an extra couple of staff while your working with their liaison person.
They fail to realise that as a result their computer system is effectively designed by this person and then complain it's a disaster when the system is implemented according to their liaisons feedback.
"But NEVER NEVER NEVER do they let the actual workers see prototypes or ask them if something will actually DO THE JOB"
If you get the people who actually know what to do with the data involved you may will finish the job. Unless that is you get some MBAs to ask them what's what. If I apply to do an MBA will they actually remove any logic circuits from my brain?
From what I've seen of younger MBA's, the logic circuits are all left in place, but the course material shorts them all out.
I don't think that's a new thing. In college, if you asked someone "What's your major?" and they replied "Business," it always meant you were dealing with an idiot.
It really can be done right.
Several years ago, we needed to replace our primary system (ERP/Accounting/etc.). We researched vendors extensively. Once the top three vendors were chosen, we involved each department lead in the demos.
Once the vendor was chosen, we had the software company send technical people, not sales people, for a week of training/gap analysis. During these sessions, EVERY SINGLE employee that would ever need to use the system attended the meetings and ere allowed to ask any questions they wanted. The software company wasn't terribly thrilled about all of this, but if they wanted to make a six-figure deal on software, they didn't have a choice.
The result of all of this was that three days after deployment, almost all of our staff was working productively. The up front costs of doing things this way paid off big in the end. The senior management of our company is very supportive of the IT department, and their support helped make for such a successful project. Ti's really too bad management at other companies just doesn't get it.
We run our company with about 50% of the staff that other similar companies in the same industry would have. We do this through very good systems and good management of these systems. Fortunately for us, ownership of the company knows this. That's why they support IT so much. They see the value, not just the cost.
> They, in their infinite wisdom, simply have the system built according to whatever fancies they have relating to what the working classes do all day, then dump that system on the workers, leaving them to sort out the total omnishambles management has once again created.
Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here!
"You don't, it doesn't count."
-The court system.
"They're all guilty of something anyway."
-Our heroes in blue
"This is going to have to be addressed on a case by case basis by defendants who will have to be able to afford expensive lawyers and appeals with no help from us."
-HARD ON CRIME District Attorney
"You guys fucked up my life and now it's either crime or starvation."
-Guy who got felony record and sex offender listing for a misdemeanor
Where are the Shysters when you really need them?
I would have imagined that the class actions would have been flying now. The county should be on the verge of going Chapter 11. Yet this and the other reports I've read don't mention this at all. Can you sue the Legal System? IANAL etc.
Meanwhile the people who made the decision are off somewhere else wreaking the same sort of havoc.
That's life ain't it?
IEEE's magazine, Spectrum, used to have articles on these government IT disasters all the time.
Seems you would seem the same bad players all the time.
Did you know they took the ACA systems live without sending ONE registration successfully through the system in testing?
Spectrum doesn't put those articles online anymore - used to be a weekly feature.
Although how many times have the UK courts systems started to computerize?
How many times has it failed?
Aer you thinking of NOMS? Libra?
http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/NHS-courts-5bn-IT-disaster-by-following-the-Libra-route
Only one icon will do...
To be fair to the US police just look at how many of them have been shot this week alone! 5 in the last 72 hours and 3 in the last 48.
And the police who have been shooting people do tend to be shooting people who are either pointing guns at them or are waving them about in a frantic manner, or are doing similar with other deadly weapons like knives.
...wrote the book on this.
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=tony+collins&sts=t&tn=crash
Dated case studies from the 80s and early 90s but still absolutely relevant. HIGHLY recommended for PMs everywhere. I've bought (second hand) copies for quite a few work colleagues over the years.
See also: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=normal+accidents
And yet despite the catalogue of fu**ups to study people keep managing to do it.
Or as the introduction to Peopleware put it
"Somewhere today someone is writing a Purchase Ledger system from scratch, and failing."
Of course 35 years later that statement cannot possibly still be true, can it?
Can it?
"Well, Mr Anderson, your crime was stealing a twinkie. Due to an administrative error, you've been booked in for an amputation which you must attend by law. Have a nice day."
That's nothing, you need manual systems to go really badly wrong. There was a case back in Roman times where a man was accused of murdering a sailor and sentenced to death. At the execution the chap he'd apparently murdered turned up and said he wasn't dead, only drunk on the day of the trial. The presiding centurion decided that he wouldn't execute the accused, but refer the matter back to the court.
The judge at the court flew into a rage at his instructions not being literally and figuratively executed, and ordered the execution of sentence be carried out on the accused, as he'd been found a murderer and sentenced to death. He then had the centurion executed for not carrying out his orders (as he had no authority to stop the execution) and the sailor executed for being responsible for a miscarriage of justice, the death of the two people executed as a result and bringing the courts into disrepute.
It's supposedly a true story, but impossible to prove given the state of Roman record keeping.
"It's supposedly a true story, but impossible to prove given the state of Roman record keeping."
"Ah, so they were using Odyssey as well!"
The judge said everyone involved was to be exonerated... Odyssey's poor data entry layout caused some peon to accidentally put 'executed'.
In the US this will be held up as a perfect example of Democratic waste and government overspending by Obama - ignoring the fact that the company selling and installing the software is out of Republican Texas. It's all stupid anyway - this isn't Republican or Democrat - it's simple human greed.
It's the American way, "Hi Mr Redskin, nice country you got there, we'll buy it for some beads"
These kind things never do.
Replace the words "software roll out" with "excuse to move public money to your pocket via your mates company"
I have worked in multiple local councils in the UK and the problems with these roll outs can ALLWAYS be pointed directly at theft
No training will be given because there is no money for training, despite paying 5 million. Out of the 5 million, only a hundred k or so will have actually been spent on the system itself, the rest on white elephants
"Not that the software is inherently bad. It is very capable and expandable. It is highly configurable"
Software that is described this way is usually inherently bad, not in the sense of it not working, but in the sense of trying to be so flexible to everyone that it becomes inefficient to use for everyone. The description of pages full of drop down menus sounds about right for what happens when this sort of thing is attempted.
One of the main causes of failure when implementing new softawre systemws is by trying to make everything "generic" and configurable, rather than just coding for what is actually required. I can remember one place where the obsession with making everything generic resulted in systems that were hopelessly convoluted and a nightmare to maintain, and not surprisingly had user interfaces which were unlike anything I had ever seen. Thankfully I was only doing consulting work there as they wanted to move to a web basedf system, so I did at least try to persuade them that doing thje same "genric" stuff was really, really difficult and expensive on the web, I still wonder whether they listened or went ahead anyway, but thankfully it was only a short consulting gig and I was pleased to get out of there with nothing worse than a few amusing stories for my colleagues.
Not sure every SME has the resource to employ a full team of software developers straight out of university to reinvent the wheel with slightly rounder spokes hence the market's need for reasonably generic, highly configurable software. Just coding for "what is required" is definitely for smaller applications and not things like ERP systems...or state management of the court system (no, you can't do that in Access). Writing exactly what is needed from scratch when you're not a software company is a risky business...but then again, if the client is big enough and the software house small enough you can pretty much dictate the roadmap of the product...this is just your bog standard implementation fuck up right here.
A management rush, complete with budget.
A software company that seduced the higher-ups on how great the system was.
Wide-open configuration with a large number of people given input.
Inadequate consultation with the people using the current system.
Lack of training for those expected to use the new system.
A bureaucracy that won't admit failure.
Have you been reading our internal purchasing guide?
We have several Tyler modules in our county, and they usually work pretty well. The only limitation is the users generally (either through lack of training or lack of training retention). I doubt the blame for this can be placed on Tyler, at least not the majority of it anyway. We don't use the court module though so maybe I'm completely wrong. :shrug:
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