Lance Gutteridge - Avoiding IT Disasters

Copyright 2018 by Thinking Works Inc.

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ISBN 978-1-7753575-1-3

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I dedicate this book to all the people who have been harmed by enterprise software systems; you deserve better

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.

Yogi Berra

Susan waited anxiously for an important mail delivery as she had done for the previous month. She was hoping that a paycheck she had been owed for more than six months would slide through the mail slot. She and her husband needed the money badly. Her husband had been laid off from his construction job and they had burned through most of their savings. They were already late on the mortgage and the bank has sent them a letter demanding payment. They had decided that her husband would go back to school but they needed to put down the first installment of the fees. It was an extremely stressful time.

When the mail came she grabbed it from the box and leafed through the few items. Just an offer from a car dealership, a letter to a previous occupant, and a flyer from a local supermarket. Not a sign of the paycheck she had been hoping to see. She had worked hard all summer and her employer still hadnt paid her.

Her heart sank. Her husband would have to cancel his registration and take a low-paying job at a fast food outlet.

But they lived in Vancouver, Canada. Surely an employer couldnt get away with not paying its employees?

In Canada people who dont get paid can seek help from the employment standards branch of the provincial government. In British Columbia the government, as in all Canadian provinces, has strict laws about paying employees and the enforcement officials have powerful tools that enable them to force delinquent employers to pay the wages they owe.

The responsibility to pay employees is taken very seriously in Canada. So much so that directors of companies are personally liable for unpaid wages. Directors of large companies routinely take out insurance to make sure they are not bankrupted by their obligation to make good on wages owed to a large group of employees.

So how was it that Susans employer has not been paying a large segment of its workforce, and paying wrong amounts to another whole group of employees? And doing this to thousands of employees for three years in some cases?

How can they get away with this?

Well, Susans employer was not some shifty fly-by-night operationit was the Canadian Federal Government. The reason she wasnt paid wasnt that the government was out of funds or that it was trying to cheat her out of wages she had earned. It was a result of their new computerized payroll system, called Phoenix.

Susan was not alone. The Canadian Government employs over 300,000 people, ranging from full-time civil servants to temporary workers, and over 70,000 of them had been underpaid or not paid at all. Another large group had been overpaid and were worried about what they should do with the extra money and how to give it back.

By 2018 this had been going on for three years, and despite assurance from the minister in charge, there seemed to be no sign of it being corrected any time soon. In the spring budget the government, tired of all the complaints and demonstrations, announced it was terminating the project and would look for another solution.

The problem started when the previous Conservative government was trying to cut spending by improving efficiency in the administration of the civil service. Like a lot of organizations, they were seduced by the thought of implementing a new software system that would, as they were told by the software salespeople, move the entire payroll operation to one location and save significant operational costs.

IBM came calling with a proposal to use an Oracle payroll system that could be adapted to meet the Canadian Governments particular situation. If the government had checked they would have discovered that the system had caused a total disaster in the state of Queensland in Australia, resulting in a billion-dollar lawsuit. The Queensland government lost that case, which showed that IBM was certainly much better at writing contracts and defending against lawsuits than it was at writing software. The same software had been implemented in Palm Beach, Florida with disastrous results, similarly for the Police Department in Austin, Texas where it failed to properly pay the police officers. In Austin this resulted in a precipitous drop in morale and some rumors of resulting suicides.

According to recent media reports the Canadian government did not check the history of this software and was unaware of those past problems. The current results have been similar to the past experiences: hundreds of millions of dollars spent to acquire the system, hundreds of millions more to modify it, and more millions draining out to try to actually make it work. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of employees have been not paid, tens of thousands have been underpaid and tens of thousands more overpaid. This has forced some civil servants to cash in retirement savings, forced some to cancel education plans, and inflicted stress on the most vulnerablethose who depend on government pension checks.

This is quite shocking, especially as it concerns such a large and credible organization as the Canadian Federal Government. However, it is perhaps not the worst example of system failure. In the U.S.A., various jurisdictions have used the Odyssey system for processing court dates, criminal records, and sentences. Problems with this system have resulted in innocent people being incarcerated.

It is bad enough to not be paid by your employer but imagine losing your liberty because of a system failure.

In the early 1960s there was a short story Computers Dont Argue by Gordon R. Dickson. Presented as a series of letters, it starts out when a member of a book club tries to return a copy of Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson that has been sent to him because of a computer error. They ignore his letters and take him to court when he doesnt pay the cost of the book. Another computer error causes him to be charged with the kidnapping of Robert Louis Stevenson, which the computers change to kidnap-murder when they discover that Robert Louis Stevenson is dead. He is sentenced to death, but the governor finally applies some common sense and pardons him. Unfortunately, the pardon is rejected by the computer systems, as it didnt have the right authorization code, and the poor consumer is executed anyway.

It was a great story, but when I read it I thought it was implausible. At the time I was one of a very small number of people who had even programmed a computer (the number of programmers at the time was probably less than 100,000). I didnt believe that humans would ever delegate judicial authority to a computer system. Surely there would always be a human to exercise common sense?