[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Two examples of major government software programs failing.

Terry W. Colvin fortean1 at mindspring.com
Mon Nov 29 04:41:12 UTC 2004


Posted to the RISKS list.


From: Debora Weber-Wulff <weberwu at fhtw-berlin.de>
Subject: The coming catastrophe in German social services

On 1 Jan 2005 Germany will switch over from two systems for compensating
people who do not work (Arbeitslosenhilfe and Sozialhilfe, money for people
who have worked but their unemployment insurance has run out and social
services payment for the poor) to a new one, Arbeitslosengeld II, called ALG
II or Hartz IV (after the guy who chaired the commission that thought this
mess up).

In order to make sure that no one hides any assets there is a 16-page
application form that needs to be filled out and all sorts of documentation
supplied. It takes an official at the public offices about an hour to put
all of this information into the central system just for one person.
Germany's jobless rate is at about 10% of the population.or 4.2 million
people officially registered, I could not find the number of people on
Sozialhilfe.

The system, however, was not finished on time. The time for starting the
data entry kept being slipped. When the data entry began, not all of the
workers could enter data at the same time, because the system
overloaded. The system has to be rebooted every day at lunch time, because
otherwise it would be too slow in the afternoon.  (Anyone hear hanging
processes screaming?). The data connections are very slow, and sometimes
die, taking all of the data entered up until now with them. It can take up
to an hour for the data entry station to permit a new logon.

If data entered is incomplete (and it often is, as someone missed one of the
many questions) the system automatically deletes the record after about
three or four weeks. Last week, a software update was put on the central
system in Nürnberg, crashing the system so completely, that the backup
had to be restored a day later. (At least they had one!).

In desperation some office managers pleaded with their workers to do
overtime and come in on the weekend to enter data. But there was a fire in
the central computing system and no data could be entered at all.

Amazingly, they have managed to calculate some of the payouts and send the
information to the people receiving them. But since they do not yet have all
of the forms and cannot put in all of the data in time, many offices are
being forced to just pay people some money in January and figure out later
if it was too much or too little.

So we pretty much have a great example of everything going wrong that
possibly can - one wonders perhaps why Germany has so many of these projects
at the moment: this, the TollCollect scheme, the health card proposed for
2006, etc.

There's a nice article in c't (in German) on why large software projects
don't work in Germany: (c't 23/2004, IT-Großprojekte: Warum so viele
Vorhaben scheitern, S. 218) It ranges from people without knowledge of
systems deciding what to implement to the politics of procurement. And, of
course, a good bit of wishful thinking - hoping that computers can cure
problems that have deeper causes.

Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, FHTW Berlin, Treskowallee 8, 10313 Berlin
Tel: +49-30-5019-2320  http://www.f4.fhtw-berlin.de/people/weberwu/

From: Pete Mellor <pm at csr.city.ac.uk>
Subject: Recent fiasco with computer system at Child Support Agency

The Child Support Agency is a UK Government organisation set up some years
ago to trace absent parents and extract maintenance payments to the parents
of the children they have abandoned.  (In the way of the world, the
absentees are usually the fathers, and the abandoned are usually the
mothers, but the opposite can occur.)

The CSA has never worked well.  Under the 'old legislation', the calculation
of payments due was complicated and time-consuming, and left little time for
staff to trace the absentees and enforce payment.

Under the 'new legislation', which went into effect on 3 Mar 2003, the
algorithm for calculating payments was simplified to allow more effort to be
concentrated on enforcement.  To implement the new rules, a computer system
was procured from EDS under a contract valued at GBP 456 million over 10
years.

On the BBC Radio 4 'Today' news and current affairs programme this morning
(Fri 19 Nov 2004), the Work and Pensions Secretary, Alan Johnson, stated
that the new computer system is "problematic", but, under pressure from the
interviewer, John Humphrys, he admitted that "disastrous" might be a better
word.

The backlog of cases is growing at 30,000 per month, and has now reached
around 250,000 cases.  The CSA's debt (money owed to abandoned parents and
children) stands at GBP 720 million, and, in addition, GBP 1 billion has
been "written off".  Of 478,000 absent parents, 417,000 "have not paid a
penny".  (I presume that these statistics cover the whole life of the CSA
under both the 'old' and 'new' systems, and reflect the great difficulty of
tracing those who owe the maintenance and enforcing payments, rather than
being due solely to recent computer problems.)

Applicants are regularly told that their cases cannot be progressed, since
certain "incidents cannot be resolved" on the new computer system.  So far,
only new cases have been entered.  95,000 cases are still stuck on the 'old
system'.  These applicants should have received interim payments of GBP 10
per week since March 2003, but the 'new system' cannot cope with this,
either.

Two employees of the CSA were interviewed anonymously.  It appears that once
an incident has occurred while processing a case, no further work can be
done on that case.  (For "incident" read "system failure".)  One interviewee
claimed that the new system "cannot cope with change".  For example, if a
couple decide to get back together (which happens, and which means that
maintenance payments no longer need to be enforced), there is no way of
entering this information into the system.

The underlying problem seems to be an inadequate requirements specification.
Alan Johnson blames EDS.  (The CSA has withheld GBP 1 million per month from
payments due to EDS under the contract, to a total of GBP 12 million so
far.)  Tony Collins of Computer Weekly said that, in his opinion, the
responsibility lay 50/50 between customer and contractor, and that CSA
probably did not know what they wanted, and their requirements were
therefore unstable.

On Wednesday, Alan Johnson faced tough questions in Parliament.  On
Thursday, the chief executive of the CSA resigned.  According to Johnson,
this was just because he had been in post for four years.  (Presumably he
wanted to spend more time with his family!)

Another triumph for UK Government IT procurement!

The official CSA website is:
   http://www.csa.gov.uk/
This includes a description of the method of calculating payment due.

To hear the brief report from the Today programme on Wed 17 Nov 2004, visit:
   http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/zwednesday_20041117.shtml

To listen to a summary of the background to the problem, and (in a later
item) the Work and Pensions Secretary, Alan Johnson, wriggling on a hook, on
Friday 19th November, visit:
   http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/
and follow the links.

Peter Mellor, Centre for Software Reliability, City University,
London EC1V 0HB  +44 (0)20 7040 8422  Pete Mellor <p.mellor at csr.city.ac.uk>


                                           Scott Peterson

--
Microsoft Mantra:
Hey! It compiles! Ship it!

447/600


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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