Daniel Davies: Don’t just do something, stand there
The phrase “The status quo is no longer an option” is reliably the leper’s bell of the modern managerial idiot. It is almost always wrong. Like Status Quo, the status quo is often vastly underrated simply because it is unfashionable. The great thing about the status quo is that it is not any worse than the status quo. Surprisingly few proposals for “radical and far reaching reform” can actually beat this standard. If any New Labour leadership candidates are looking for a Big Idea to carry the mission forward, could I suggest “stasis”?
Posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
| See also • Matthew Norman: While Blair burns, Brown plays his fiddle • Attention to detail • Rivers of Blears |
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Filed under ...In a brewery, Chicken Nuggets, UK politics |
I know about Taurus and the London Stock Exchange but then how come this piece years later in The Economist (unfortunately subscription only) on 2 May 2003:
“IF GORDON BROWN is still basking in the apparently widespread approval for his plans to revive the National Health Service with a massive transfusion of cash, a small item of seemingly unrelated news last week, reported in Computer Weekly, should worry him. A leaked memo from the Lord Chancellor’s department indicated that Libra, a £319m IT project designed to link magistrates’ courts with other organisations, such as the police, customs and the Crown Prosecution Service, was on the brink of collapse. Libra’s problems are the latest in a long list of government IT horror stories (see table) which bode ill for the government’s ambitions.… ”
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_TTTTJJD
With due acknowledgement to the diligent tracking of failing public sector computer projects by Commputer Weekly - the industry’s leading magazine for professionals about IT markets and jobs - The Economist article went on to list another six projects, besides Libra, which had failed or incurred massive overspends before doing what they were supposed to.
The current hiatus over the withdrawal of Accenture from Connecting for Health suggests that little been learned since. The one encouraging sign is that all or most of the risks of project development failures lately seem to have been passed on from taxpayers to the private sector developers, for which many thanks. What definitely isn’t encouraging is that is that most of the big software companies in Britain, including the big multinationals, have all been involved in failing projects - such as this:
“The Automatic Fingerprint Recognition Consortium, comprising more than three-quarters of Britain’s police forces, has sued IBM over an electronic fingerprinting system they claim doesn’t work. The system, purchased in 1992, is supposed to match fingerprints taken from a crime scene with those on file in a database. The group is seeking unspecified damages from Big Blue, and has canceled its contract, citing ’serious and long-standing failures in the service.’ Meanwhile, IBM insists the system works, pointing out that more than 125,000 fingerprints have been matched since it was installed. IBM plans to fight the lawsuit. (Wall Street Journal 3/31/95 B8)”
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Contrib/Edupage/1995/04/02-04-1995.html#9
How come? What of the huge proliferation of computer and media degree courses in British universities during the 1990s? What has gone wrong?
He lost me when he suggested that Status Quo are underrated.
Bob, I think it just these systems have massive complexity built into them from the beginning. Only a handful of people fully understand the requirements and these never seem to be adequately communicated and are constantly shifting. I worked in IT for ten years in the private sector and I’m racking my brains to think of a system that I worked on that wasn’t a lemon.
The endemic attitude that I experienced and later came to embrace was that you didn’t miss a deadline but fannied about until the last possible moment before raking in the overtime to make sure the system went in on time. Then you raked in the overtime in after hours support fixing the heinous bugs introduced during the rushed implementation.
You also have to remember that most computer degrees become out of date shortly after their students take off their graduation gowns. I studied COBOL on my degree, a language that was to prove itself the computerised Latin not long after my first job application went in the post. Subsequent jobs in my career involved learning other languages on the hoof - an atmosphere perfectly conducive to producing lemons.
Bliss, you’re a philistine.
There are at least several causes for concern in all this:
- The numbers of major computer project failures for public sector clients have been so frequent and have involved so many of the large indigenous and transnational software companies in Britain that the issues can’t be brushed aside as incidental or occasional lapses in a passing phase.
- The implicit areas of software architecture and design and project management cannot have escaped the attention of computer departments in academia in Britain. To what extent have these issues been addressed in the curricula of recent degree courses?
- Ministers have certainly and regularly flounced around with speeches about the new “knowledge-based economy” and how well Britain is meeting the challenges of the future - all the predictable, glowing rhetoric but with little evident recognition of the sad realities in the computer industry in Britain. When and from where will the wake-up call come?
Perhaps, as per David Craig’s Plundering the Public Sector, the major contributing factor to the failure of so many of the government’s IT projects is not so much a lack of technical expertise, or even technical fannying around, but the hubris of government departments and their unelected business/IT consultant advisors - leading to massive centralised projects designed without sufficient consultation with people who actually work in the NHS or wherever, and so with all sorts of heavily-touted bells & whistles that are actually useless (Craig’s prime example is the completely superfluous Choose and Book system included as part of Connecting for Health).
I would hate to be an apologist for the kind of behaviour detailed in David Craig’s book, but it could certainly be argued that Choose & Book had failure built into the plan. The project was launched, the specifications drawn up and the code was beginning to be written despite the fact that the whole principle hadn’t been agreed with the doctors. When it became clear that the GP industry’s reaction was “fuck a bunch of that, unless it means a load more money”, the whole basis of the thing had to be revised, leaving a new system to be implemented, which naturally bore little resemblance to the one that the original C&B architecture had been drawn up for.