Recruiting FAIL: Update with ITCRA documents

I've put on-line the follow-up documents [links below fold] I received from ITCRA on my complaint, lodged in Aug/Sep 2012 and apparently resolved before Christmas that year. I have on record, because almost all my interactions have been via email, that I wasn't informed on the lack of Natural Justice until around six months after I lodged my grievance.

I was given an undertaking that a) ITCRA would write a Case Study from my complaint, in lieu of informing me of their determinations and actions taken, and b) I would be sent a copy.

A year on, Dec 2013, I enquired after the Case Study. My guess from the delay is that it'd never been written, as promised in writing.

It was only in February this year, 2014, that I received that Case Study.
In a separate email I was informed that the Agent had been dismissed over this matter, presumably in late December 2012.

Microsoft: End Games have started.

News report on a shareholder class action against the Microsoft management team and  failure of "Surface", and consequent $900MM writedown of inventory.

My reaction to the friend who sent me the link:

I.T. is NOT a Profession. There are NO consequences for Failure, It's Unprofessional to not Learn.

A response to a piece on Delimiter reporting QLD and VIC government project failures.

Compare the local IT failures with these comments from Infoq. Author site.

This is best illustrated by the findings from the US Department of Defense (the DoD).[10]
The DoD analysed the results of its software spending, totalling an eye-watering $35.7 billion, during 1995.
They found that only 2 per cent (2%) of the software was able to be used as delivered.
The vast majority, 75 per cent, of the software was either never used or was cancelled prior to delivery.
The remaining 23 per cent of the software was only used following modification.
That would suggest that the DoD actually only received business value from $0.75 billion of its expenditure – nearly $35 billion of its expenditure did not result in software that delivered any immediate business value.
[10] The results of the study were presented at the 5th Annual Joint Aerospace Weapons Systems Support, Sensors, and Simulation Symposium (JAWS S3) in 1999.

Unsolicited Advise to a classmate

I've never been a politician, managed a large budget or run even a moderate sized project, so why do I have the hubris to offer some unsolicited advice to a newly minted I.T. Minister, to whom by accident, I was once briefly a classmate?

Rejecting these thoughts "because nobody else is doing them" is an option, though not a great reason.

Rejecting them "because they're too expensive" is a judgement call, but has to be measured against "Compared to What?".
Doing nothing will cost you a whole bunch, you've already have the report on that.

The core arguments in support of my observations are:

• How important to the current and future BackOffice and FrontOffice operations of your Government is I.T.? I suggest that the machinery of Government cannot operate without it I.T. systems, not simply ineffectively, but like airlines, not at all.
• There is an internal consistency in what I propose, derived from one of the toughest businesses around. The challenge is not "will this work", but "how can it be made to work for us".

I.T. Failure == Corporate Failure

Stephen Bartholomeusz writing in Business Spectator, 18 Nov 2009, on the ASIC court case over the collapse of One.Tel.

Bartholomeusz neatly summarises the root cause of the failure:

Unhappily, its billing systems didn’t work, so it piled up debtors, while its competitors responded to the cut-price strategies.

He goes on to say:

While professing publicly that the group was on-track to be cash-positive..., internally One.Tel appears to have had little control or understanding of its cash flows or the mounting issues created by its billing system

and finishes:

Whatever Rich might claim, One.Tel wasn't a successful company, unless success is measured by revenue, not cash flows or execution.

This is the first case I've noticed where the immediate cause of failure of a large, public company  has been it's I.T. systems. The root cause is poor management with an inability to execute - or to understand and control it's I.T.

The field of "Software Engineering" is 40 years old now.
How could this foreseeable and preventable failure have happened with competent professionals, especially if Software Engineering had achieved it's aims?

There is a multiple tragedy hidden here:

• Software Engineering has failed to impress it's primary market: Business Management.
• Educators and Researchers are not, as a matter of course, going to analyse this failure and use it as a case study. Compare the 1974 explosion at Flixborough or the 1970 collapse of the Westgate bridge during construction.
• IT practitioners aren't going to be informed by their Professional Societies of the causes and preventing a recurrence.
• Business Management and I.T. practice remains "Consequence Free".

If a Billion Dollar Failure isn't a notable event and worthy of preventing recurrence, then what is?
Why are ASIC, the ASX and the Federal and State Governments silent on this point?
If not their job, then whose?

Imagine if QANTAS had a fire at a maintenance facility and lost $1B of buildings, plant and equipment. You know absolutely the company, multiple regulators and all the professional bodies would actively investigate the matter.

They would be looking for "root causes" of this event, other problems, ways to fix the system, processes & procedures to prevent or early-detect this class of problem again and co-incidentally if any individuals were responsible. Not just front-line grunts, but if anyone in management  (up to the CEO) was culpable, negligent, incompetent or asleep-at-the-wheel.

The absolute tragedy here is not the loss to these investors (employees, vendors, customers, ...) but that nothing is going to change, that this massive loss bought nothing.

What is more galling to me is that nobody in the Press, Government, ASX, Investment bodies, Judicary or Regulators thinks anything more could or should be done...

Death by Success

Being too successful leads to failure unless you are aware of the problem and carefully monitor and protect against it. Every large company faces this problem - in I.T. for example, Google and Microsoft.

Microsoft, AntiTrust (Monopolies) and Patents

MSFT is threatening to Sue the Free World.
Patents are a state-granted Monopoly in return for full disclosure.

• Patents are useless unless defended.
• Patents are granted in a single jurisdiction at a time - there are no 'global' patents.
• Patents are uncertain until tested in court - by the full panoply of judges, counsel and mountains of paper.
• Patent 'trolls' and 'submarining' exist (and are legal tactics) - people who play the system for Fun and Profit. They hide out until someone is successful, then don't try to license their patents - but sue (for large amounts).

Microsoft may claim that code infringes its patents - but that's just a posture. If they were for real, they'd be launching court cases to decide the matter.

I.T. Failure - it's not about noticing and fixing the problems

Here's the deal:

• Commercial I.T. is generally poorly done - if only because it can't be proven otherwise.
  
• It's been that way for 50 years.
  
• Many people have attempted to define, measure and address these endemic problems - with very limited success.
  
• There are simple remedies, but the people who 'write the cheques' aren't implementing them.

What's Going On?

The problems with I.T. are nottechnical, nor within the industry. [It's not a 'profession' under any definition.]
Something else is going on: it's outside I.T. - the "meta-level" - the people that employ and manage us...
And it's been very consistent over time - provably for more than 40 yeras.

And it's cross-cultural - every country was affected by "Y2K". It was foreseeable, completely avoidable, and at no additional cost, if remediation had been generally started around 1992. [There have been many, many "Clock Roll-overs" in the history of computing - and there are more still coming at us. E.g. The Unix "time_t" rollover around 2036]

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On an ITIL course last week I was surprised that people didn't know any early computing history...
And there's that quote (roughly): "If you don't know history, you are condemed to repeat it"...

When was the first computer? That'd be Charles Babbage's never finished analytical and difference engines.
Maybe.

Wikipedia has an excellent set of articles on the topic.
There's a site dedicated to Alan Turing that is worth reading.

The first Commercial electronic stored program computer (or general purpose computer) was built around 1951 by the "J Lyons" sweets company in England - "LEO" - Lyons Electronic Office.

Computing is well into it's second half-century.

How far has "I.T" come in that time?
What about in relation to other disciplines?

The problem that I have with I.T. is the number of unnecessary project failures and the amount of avoidable waste.
In the early 1990's, Larry Constantine (an ACM Distinguished Engineer), noted that there was no "Software Crisis" - that in 4 decades nothing much had changed. A 'crisis' is a short lived thing.

What we have in I.T. is a very long, drawn out, "train smash". There is no urgent 'crisis'.

Proof of Systematic, Endemic Problems

"Software Engineering", well described in Wikipedia, was coined around 1967 and the first conference held in 1968.

In the mid-1960's, NATO had noticed that projects involving computing had huge failure and wastage rates.
And "Software Engineering" was an attempt to address and control this flood of time, money and talent.

Only it hasn't.
Given that the problem was recognised and actively addressed around 15 years from the inception of Commercial I.T., why do we have any waste and failure in I.T. another 35 years on??

Almost every mistake possible - human, technical, organisational, planning and financial - has been made.
But also continues to be made...
All that hard-earnt learning seems to have gone away in a puff of negligence.

It doesn't have to be this way

Here's the proof that this is not just "the human condition" and not "as good as it gets":
The Aviation Industry.

Not only has Aviation become much safer and less incident and accident prone over exactly the same time as I.T. has been around, but it can demonstrate as much. The FAA and similar bodies have detailed statistics that show on every measure "RPT" (regular passenger transport) has been consistently improving.

But what is more interesting, "General Aviation" (i.e. private planes) reached a plateau some time ago. They are not improving their safety.

The two sets of figures demonstrate what is possible and what is missing from I.T.:
Management Will

Passenger planes don't crash as much because people of "power and influence" care about the result.
I.T. failures are directly failures of Management Will. QED.

As Mark Toomey of Infonomics says: "Memo to the Board: If I.T. fails, it's your fault." [sorry, no reference]