It’s all so painfully familiar: with a crunch date of February 3, the Democratic Party in Iowa decided to charge ahead with an IT rollout that comprised an entirely new software system spread out across thousands of sites to record the result of the Democratic caucus for its presidential nominee.
It was, inevitably, a complete failure. The results from the Iowa caucus were supposed to come in nearly 24 hours ago. Instead, it has become a rolling news cycle of tech catastrophe.
We’re not even going to bother to dig into lessons learned because they are the same ones that every sysadmin since the dawn of time has dealt with – and spends their entire career warning the suits about, to greater and lesser degrees of success.
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We could write pages and pages of reports about how differently people experienced this almighty IT cock-up but what’s the point? If you’re reading The Reg you already know what the problem is and the details quickly become irrelevant.
Here’s what’s happened: the suits hired a company because they were swayed by their CVs and sales talk and didn’t run it past anyone that knew what they were doing. Then the suits didn’t listen to all the people telling them it was a bad idea and they should delay rollout. And they didn’t allow sufficient time for testing and training.
For details read the article – the amount of cockups will make you laugh, if not cry.
Robin Edgar
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