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Risk management

Neverending Story pattern: School District ERP system late, over-budget

November 14, 2018
Neverending Story pattern: School District ERP system late, over-budget

A story a few days ago caught my eye, not because it was unusual, but because it follows so familiar a pattern. Here are a few excerpts from the article: MANATEE — Late nights, hefty contracts and humming computers are a norm in the district’s School Support Center, where employees are working to fix a […]

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The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]

January 31, 2018
The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]

Back in 2000, PricewaterhouseCooper published my research white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: Systems Failure (1976-2000)” (PDF). This paper reflected research I and my staff had done over several months on roughly 120 two- or three-party lawsuits involving information technology. I found that almost all of these lawsuits fell into one or two of six […]

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£10 billion ($16 billion) IT failure — yep, it’s the UK again

September 18, 2013 0 Comments
£10 billion ($16 billion) IT failure — yep, it’s the UK again

It can be hard to imagine that you can spend billions of dollars (or, worse yet, pounds) on IT systems without having much to show for it, but, yes, it has happened again: An abandoned NHS patient record system has so far cost the taxpayer nearly £10bn, with the final bill for what would have […]

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An IT success, albeit an expensive one

September 17, 2013 0 Comments
An IT success, albeit an expensive one

  Since I’ve been writing a lot about large-scale IT project failures, here’s a story about a troubled-but-completed IT project: the CalPERS re-engineering effort. It’s hard to call it successful when it cost double the original estimate ($586 million vs. $279 million), took over 16 years (it started in 1995 and went live in 2011), […]

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$1 billion example of the Thermocline of Truth

September 9, 2013 4 Comments
$1 billion example of the Thermocline of Truth

In a post here last week, I made reference to what I call “the thermocline of truth.” The basic idea is simple: those in the trenches of a large project know how badly it’s going, while those at the top think everything’s fine; the level at which the ‘truth’ stops is somewhere in the middle. As […]

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