Investigating the Debacle
2005-03-24 13:56:58.349315+00 by petronius 1 comments
It seems likely that at some point most of us will end up in organizations that decide to undergo a massive technology upgrade. Many books have been written about the pitfalls in such a project, but problems still occur. Infoworld has an interesting piece on the Trilogy disaster, where the FBI's huge project to upgrade their computer systems collapsed under its own weight.There are many problems and many guilty parties, such as a total rethink of the project after 9/11, a monomania for paper-based systems probably inherited from J. Edgar Hoover, and a deliberately obtuse vendor. When you realize that the FBI appointed 5 CIOs in 4 years, and that an average of one spec change per day was sent to the vendor, failure isn't an option but rather an inevitability.