World’s worst IT project: UK identification cards
March 23, 2009 by Valerie HelmbreckPosted in: Communication, Compliance, Gadgets, Hardware, In this week's e-newsletter, Information security, Latest News & Views
The rule that no good IT project comes off without a major hitch has proven true on a truly grand scale.
In a move to boost security nationwide, Britain’s first identification cards were released, complete with fingerprint and facial details.
The biometric details on each ID card would essentially eliminate identity theft and other fraud.
Of course, it would have helped if the government also completed the electronic readers for the ID cards. A spokesperson for Britain’s Home Office admitted that no employers, police forces, colleges or hospitals have been given a machine that can read the ID cards — and that there are no future plans to issue them.
Instead, authorities will have to rely on visual checks of the cards, making them no more secure than typical photo identification. They can call a UK Border Agency hot line to verify whether or not a card is genuine, but the Home Office asserts this should only be done for a “minority of cases.”
The Golden Rule of IT projects: Even if your department has the newest tech system available, it won’t make a difference if only half of the upgrade actually works.
Have you ever experienced an IT project this half-baked?
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March 24th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
ERP, the three little letters that spell big death for most Small-to-Medium Businesses (SMBs)
Very few companies understand what they want from an Enterprise Resource Planning system. Most companies want just a finance system, and could leverage a small to mid-market product, but end up implementing a large-market product with modules and features that they don’t need.
Once implemented, most companies find that a great deal of customization is required in order to meet promised functionality and objectives. Customization is expensive because it is effort-intensive, and precludes upgrading the product, resulting in an expensive information asset that is “version locked” at a particular version of the code, and therefore unsupportable by the vendor. The focus for any company’s ERP implementation should be around interfaces, not customizations. Interfaces allow data exchange with other systems and are relatively easy to develop and update as required by upgrades.
Little or no formalized business processes means no clearly-defined objectives and unsupportable technology processes. Many SMBs have a multitude of ad-hoc processes that are not well-defined and thus can’t be encapsulated in the tool. There is usually a lot of feedback from the business side: “We don’t DO OUR WORK that way!” As the processes are formalized, there is a lot of development and technology support that has to go in to iteratively re-implementing these processes in the tool.
Inadequate understanding of technology requirement and capital investment often means supporting a production system where SLAs required by the business can’t be delivered by the technology. Many companies, especially small businesses, think: “We can run this on a couple of servers.” Even a very small implementation would need instances for the following: production, test, development, and disaster recovery. That’s a minimum of 4 servers for a VERY small implementation, NOT including high-availability. Best practice around protecting information such as HR data or confidential financial data (or even customer data in some sectors) means that there is a practical requirement for a separate database tier. For a mid-market implementation, a realistic requirement could start at 20 servers — all of which require infrastructure such as backups, rack space, network connections, a KVM connection, and power. A SMB might sink $1M in to ERP software thinking that this is the bulk of the cost, but unknowingly fail to calculate the true TCO by excluding ammortized hardware and maintenance costs that could be $40k to $55k a year (in this scenario), cost of backups that could be $20k/yr, bandwidth for replication…… etc….
Staffing is usually a huge question: How does a SMB balance between staffing for implementation and operationalizing once implementation is complete. The answer is: Implementation is never quite complete. Once the bulk of the implementation is complete, there are still change requests, bug fixes, reports to write, and plenty of other work for the implementation staff. Additionally, as soon as the first implementation cycle is complete, work should begin on updating to the next revision or planning the next upgrade. The reality is that the bulk of “temporary” people brought in during implementation could become permanent residents. Many SMBs underestimate staffing requirements to support an ERP, and could reflect $1M to $2M / yr in salaries (or more!). Business Analyssts, ERP consultants, and DBAs are NOT cheap skill sets, and it does not take a whole lot of those folks to make up $1M in salaries. Even fewer if staffing dollars are being spent on “permanent consultants”.
There are a host of additional project risks, but those are the big ones.
Define the scope, define and map business processes, agree on functionality, understand and define realistic technology and staffing requirements in order to correctly define the TCO.
July 26th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
kvm switches are my hobby
December 22nd, 2009 at 11:24 am
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