5 of the biggest failures and horrors in information technology | eXo platform (2023)

IT has become an essential part of our lives today. IT enables us to do most of our daily tasks and most jobs require software and a computer. However, these tools that we use every day are not without flaws, which often result in costly and painful mistakes.IT can also be a professional killer. Here are 5 of themThe biggest mistakes in information technologyand fear:

1. A German professional basketball team was downgraded to a lower division due to a Windows update.

On March 13, 2015, German second division basketball team Paderborn Baskets was downgraded to a lower division for a game start delay due to the scoreboard laptop requiring a 17-minute Windows update.

The game between Chemnitz Niners and Paderborn Baskets was supposed to start normally when Paderborn connected his laptop to the scoreboard. According to Paderborn Baskets Managing Director Patrick Seidel, as reported by the newspaper Die Zeit, the laptop was connected at 6 p.m. (i.e. 1 hour and 30 minutes before the game) and has been set to "as usual". But according to Seidel: “When both teams were warming up, the computer crashed. If we restart it at 7:20 p.m. m., it started downloading updates automatically.” When the computer finished downloading and installing all the updates, the game finally started at 7:55 p.m. M

Paderborn won the game 69-62. Chemnitz, on the other hand, protested the win, claiming that since the game was 25 minutes late and German basketball rules only allowed a 15-minute delay, Paderborn should have been penalized.

"Chemnitz cannot be blamed," added Seidel. With the result, Paderborn missed a penalty point and was relegated from the ProA division to the ProB division.

2. A large drug wholesaler failed with a large ERP implementation

In the early 1990s, FoxMeyer, a health care services company, was the fifth largest drug wholesaler in the United States with annual sales of $5 billion and about 500,000 items shipped daily.

Due to stiff competition, FoxMeyer needed a solution that could make complex supply chain decisions while facing cost pressures. FoxMeyer decided that an ERP would be the best solution to get real-time information, automate inventory systems and integrate them into one system. The company hoped to eliminate unnecessary or redundant activities, establish adequate inventory levels, and implement more responsive customer service.System Integration Serviceshelp to connect different components of a company into a whole, be it a few systems or components, and thus simplify the various processes considerably

This computer system, a multi-million dollar project, was the first of its kind to come into existencepharmaceutical industry. The cost of implementing SAP was estimated at $65 million and the ERP system should save FoxMeyer approximately $40 million per year.

The budget included:

• $4.8 million HP Client/Server Computer System
• $4 million for the software
• Consulting costs in the millions
• $18 million for a new 340,000 square foot computerized warehouse

This failure was the result of poor planning and execution.

Planning:

1. Bad ERP selection
2. Without taking into account the advice of other consultants.
3. Lack of contingency planning
4. No End User Involvement

Implementation:

1. No restructuring of business processes
2. insufficient evidence
3. Project scope too ambitious
4. Self-interest area of ​​IT specialists
5. bad support management
6. Lack of end-user collaboration

Unfortunately for FoxMeyer, the project was a total disaster, with a final bill of $100 million for the ERP implementation. FoxMeyer saved only half of the projected amount, and the company filed for bankruptcy a few months later.

3. A $2 billion air traffic control system went down due to insufficient computer memory

On April 30, 2014, hundreds of LAX flights were delayed or canceled because all of the airport's computers crashed due to a bug in the En-route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system.

The system failure was caused by a U-2 spy plane flying over the region. Lockheed Martin Corp. The $2.4 billion manufactured system stalled and tried again to correct the error due to missing altitude information in the plane's flight plan. After an air traffic controller entered an estimated altitude for the aircraft, the system calculated all possible flight paths to ensure it was not on a collision course with other aircraft. However, this process caused the system to run out of memory and shut down all other flight processing functions. Fortunately, there were no reports of injuries or accidents.

The ERAM system failed because it limited the amount of data each aircraft could send. Most planes have simple flight plans, so they don't exceed this limit. However, the U-2 deployed that day had a complex flight plan that pushed it to the system limit.

4. The fiasco of Queensland Health's new payroll system

When the Queensland state government introduced a new payroll system in 2006, the design seemed simple. Five years later, however, the bill's review committee called it "the worst public service failure in Australian history".

In late 2007, the State of Queensland commissioned IBM Australia to set up a new payroll system for Queensland Health (QH)'s 80,000 employees. The original deal had a budget of around $6 million and was scheduled to go live in six months.

However, it did not come as expected. In fact, the system only went live in late 2010 with major flaws and an additional cost of nearly $25 million. Unfortunately, even though the central system was up and running, QH had to hire an additional 1,000 employees to manually handle payroll, which totaled $1.15 billion over eight years.

When the Commission finalized its report, it found flaws in all phases of the project, including the project's procurement process, contract scheduling and supplier management.

5. The launch of Ariane 5 has become one of the greatest failures in information technology

The Ariane 5 Flight 501 rocket was part of the Ariane project, a Western European project signed in 1973 that aimed to launch a pair of three-ton satellites into orbit with each launch and would give Europe a position of power in the commercial space . . . It took 10 years to complete the project and a total of $7 billion to make it possible.

Ariane 5 v 501 was launched on Tuesday 4 June 1996 and crashed a few seconds later. Two Inertial Reference Systems (IRS) with identical hardware and software worked in parallel inside the launch vehicle. If the on-board computer recognizes that the active IRS has failed, it switches directly to the backup system.

The (IRS) had its own internal computer and measured the launcher's elevation and distance improvements. Information from this system was sent to the onboard computer that ran the flight program. The launch vehicle's guidance system shut down 36.7 seconds after launch when its own computer attempted to convert the rocket's lateral velocity data from a 64-bit format to a 16-bit format. The number was too large because Ariane 5's horizontal acceleration was much faster than Ariane 4's, resulting in an overrun error.

The number to be converted was greater than 32,767, the largest integer that can be stored in a 16-bit signed integer, and therefore the conversion failed. There were no exception handlers associated with the conversion to Ariane 5, so the system's exception-handling capabilities were activated, causing the software to shut down.

The root cause of this disaster was that when the control system shut down, it handed control over to the identical backup system, which a few milliseconds earlier had failed in exactly the same way and was running identical software. In fact, the algorithm that contained the bug that caused this disaster was useless once the rocket was airborne, as its sole function was to align the system before launch. It should have been turned off, but due to an earlier decision by the engineers of previous versions of the Ariane, they left it on for the first 40 seconds of flight to allow for an easy system restart in the event of a brief lull. in the countdown system.

As a result, the rocket exploded, shattered into a million pieces and fell into an open field. The failure cost another $370 million and reduced a large and potentially groundbreaking project to speck of dust.

Walid Hamrouni

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Product Marketing Specialist

I'm a product marketer and technology enthusiast. My role at eXo is to support the marketing and operational activities of our digital collaboration tool. I will blog primarily about digital transformation, collaboration, open source technology and navigating the eXo platform.