W12 - Process Redesign (3) and Implementation

Source / Reference:
1)  "The 10 biggest failures in IT history " by J Wallen 2009
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/the-10-biggest-failures-in-it-history/1126

Subject:
In Lec 12 – Google search & report the top 10 IT failure in history. What was common to all? How might the failures have been made into successes?
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Response:

According to the blog written by Jack Wallen in TechRepublic website, he listed out 10 of the biggest failures in IT.

1: Windows Vista

2: NeXT

3: BeOS

4: Cobalt Qube

5: Y2K

6: MP3

7: Richard Stallman

8: WordPerfect

9: IPv6

10: Mesh networks

I’ve spotted the following common attributes of these IT failures:

1. They introduced the new innovation or the new I.T revolution

2. They brought in the new technology or platform.

3. Their purpose were either to replace the existing technology which is end of life or address the anticipated problem that left by the existing products. 

4. The impact that brought by the existing problem were overblown

5. Mostly they were new but not user friendly

6. They could not sustain long in the market

7. The end result of the new product in fact downgrade the system capability

There are some examples to elaborate those common attributes are as follows:

First, Windows Vista is the replacement of Window XP, the overall comments were negative and not widely been used.  Most of the end-uses / enterprise decided not to go for this O/S due to the stability and compatibility concerns.

Second, Y2K brought the impact to the most of the enterprise application, some of them threaten that the airplane engine would stop during flying. Or people started thinking to withdraw all their money from bank as they afraid the systems faults after 2000. In fact the impact was overblown.  Most of enterprise carried out the immediate action to fix the bugs and certified before 2000. We looked back and found most were software related and they are pretty old software.

Third, IPv6 is the next version of IPv4, it was introduced due to the anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is different format than IPv4 and suppose it provide more IP capacity.  However IPv6 is not being commonly used and the IPv4 impact hasn’t been reached seriously.

How might the failures have been made into successes?

Most of the people always expected the new technology coming out which could bring in the new features that could satisfy their additional wants from the existing technology. However, some of the new changes were not recognized and eventually became redundant features that would be finally forgotten.  Even worse, some of the changes became the new platform that totally different from the existing version.  Although the users had the background knowledge but still got confusing like learning the brand new technology. People may not want to change their skill set hence they finally retain the existing version.  On the other hand, people suffer the pain to use the new features one if the benefit brought by the new features is greater.

Although the research and analyst processes has been went through, sometimes developers always neglect the impact behind the technology changes and under estimate how likely the user adopt the new features.

Developer should consider the necessity of the new features, could it be really needed by the entire industry. For instance, Redhat Linux o/s is commonly use in financially industry, Redhat would regularly introduce the new o/s version which fix the bugs and enhance some features. However these features may not be required by the financial industry. Financial industry used Redhat because the o/s is stable, not the features.  Hence the new o/s will not be upgraded. Later on when the existing o/s reaches end of support life, financial enterprise may consider the migration to other Linux platform to avoid using Redhat again which introduce the new version too frequent.

Sometimes the new platform and application will introduce the new skill set.  In general most people are interested in learning the new skill set, but not all of them.  Developers should consider how the skill set can easily be picked up. People would lose their interests if people require spending a lot of time to learn it. In addition, the new feature must be commonly recognized, otherwise people will ignore it.