Risk Factor

The FAA announced today that the team lead by ITT Corporation has been selected as "the prime contractor for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), the keystone technology to the Next Generation Air Transportation System. The new system promises to significantly reduce delays and enhance safety by using precise signals from the Global Navigation Satellite System instead of those from traditional radar to pinpoint aircraft locations."

"The contract is worth approximately $1.8 billion from 2007 to 2025. ITT Corporation will build the ADS-B ground stations and own and operate the equipment. The FAA will pay subscription charges for ADS-B broadcasts transmitted to properly equipped aircraft and air traffic control facilities."

Hopefully, ITT will be able to implement the ADS-B on time, on budget and to specification, and doesn't end up like the last major air traffic control upgrade effort called the Advanced Automation System (AAS) project.

As described by the GAO in this 1998 testimony, "the AAS which began in the early 1980s, involves FAAâ''s acquisition of modern workstations and computers that process radar and flight data for controllersâ'' use.

Because of severe cost, schedule, and technical problems, FAA restructured the automation program in 1994. The Advanced Automation System (AAS) project, divided into 5 separate segments, was the centerpiece of the program before its 1994 restructuring.

In 1983, FAA estimated the cost to develop AAS to be $2.5 billion and completion was scheduled for 1996. When International Business Machines (IBM) was awarded a development contract in 1988, after a 4-year design competition, FAA estimated the project would cost $4.8 billion and be completed in 1998. By 1994, when FAA restructured the automation program, FAA estimated the cost to develop AAS to be as much as $7.6 billion with completion as late as 2003."

We are currently living in airport hell because of AAS's failure. Yet, if the AAS system hadn't been canceled, and finally completed in 2003, we would have an air traffic system that we would be using for probably the next 30 or more years before being replaced.

Now, it is interesting to speculate about whether we are going to be better off with the ADS-B system using GPS navigation that we hopefully will have up and running by 2015 or the old AAS design that might have been finally completed four years ago using advanced radar technology.

It would make for an interesting cost-benefit analysis - maybe by screwing up 13 years ago, the FAA actually did us all a favor.

Over the past decade or so, the UK certainty seems to been in a hurry to implement a 1984 society. It already has the largest DNA registry in the world, the UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database, which contains the records of over 4 million individuals. The fact that 1 in 8 records is faulty doesn't seem to be a deterrent to the police or government officials (like former PM Tony Blair) wanting everyone's DNA on file.

Then there is the children's' national registry, which by next year will have details of every child under 18 (all 11 million of them), including, "the country, listing their name, address and gender, as well as contact details for their GP, school and parents and other carers. The record will also include contacts with hospital consultants and other professionals, and could show whether the child has been the subject of a formal assessment on whether he or she needs extra help."

Of course, certain children 's records will be excluded (like those of politicians and celebrities), but for everyone else, some 330,000 "vetted" others will have access to them. The government has promised tight security over the records, but then why are some records being excluded? I wonder if celebrity and politician children have their DNA kept off the DNA registry as well - since there are over 100,000 innocent children DNA records on file.

Of course, the UK has a big lead in security and CCTV cameras as well, with an estimated 4.2 million in operation. There are red light enforcement and speed cameras throughout the country as well. This spring, new "talking" CCTV cameras were being installed in 20 areas across England that will inform individuals that they are engaged in littering or other anti-social behaviors.

And to add a bit more emphasis to the idea that we're from the government and we are here to help is a plan to implant microchips in trash containers as a means to encourage people to throw out less rubbish.

The UK does seem on the cutting edge of using IS&T to shape a different - if not necessarily - better society.

While not an IS&T related story, it is interesting from a speculative risk perspective. The London Telegraph had a nice little story on the auction of the key "believed to have fitted the locker that contained the binoculars for the crowâ''s nest."

As the story notes,

It is thought to have fitted the locker that contained the crow's nest binoculars, vital in detecting threats to the liner lurking in the sea in the pre-sonar days of 1912.

Catastrophically for the Titanic and the 1,522 lives lost with her, the key's owner, Second Officer David Blair, was removed from the crew at the last minute and in his haste forgot to hand it to his replacement.

This story should be a reminder that a small event in conjunction with a series of other improbable events can easily lead to disaster.

Without access to the glasses, the lookouts in the crow's nest were forced to rely on their eyes and only saw the iceberg when it was too late to take action.

BTW, the key is expected to bring between $125 K to $150K at auction.

USA Today ran a small story last week on Nissan Motors plans to equip all of its cars and trucks with a dashboard gauge showing the fuel-efficiency of one's driving. The gauge displays your instantaneously computed miles per gallon as a bar graph - the more fuel efficient you drive, the longer the bar displayed.

Nissan claims that based on its in-house testing drivers will cut their fuel by 10%.

I bet if the price per gallon of gasoline was also displayed, or maybe the IRS standard cost per mile reimbursement rate (currently 48.5 cents per mile) used instead, people would drive even less. Seeing that the drive to the local store ten miles away cost you $9.70 might give you incentive to do it less.

Maybe Nissan will add in a costing feature as well in the future. The average cost per gallon gasoline or a total cost of driving per mile could be broadcast over a preset radio frequency, which then could be used to compute the cost per trip.

Given that Nissan's gauge looks software driven, this shouldn't be too difficult too add.

While the LA Unified School District payroll mess is one sorry affair, what is even worse is what has happened in Philadelphia. This from a 20 August 2007 press release from Philadelphia's City Controller Alan Butkovitz:

Since the late 1980â''s the City of Philadelphia has spent an estimated $35 -$40 million on four separate attempts to replace its 30 year old Customer Billing Information System used for generating monthly water bills. All of these attempts have failed. The City is currently in the process of its fifth attempt, the â''newâ'' Project Ocean, at an additional cost of another 6.7 million dollars.

For a full report on the situation, you can go here.

ComputerWorld has good historical coverage of the issue beginning with a recent story posted here.

Controller Butkovitz did say that:

I want to put the City on notice that any sign of failure in the future, will trigger an immediate hold by me on future payments to this and any vendor involved in this project.

One can only hope - but given past failures I wouldn't bet on it.

I received a short note from Prof. Brian Randell, Emeritus Professor, and Senior Research Investigator, School of Computer Science at New Castle University that the "Gang of 23" have been given permission to publish the supplementary evidence on Independent Reviews that was provided at their request to the House of Commons Select Committee on Health's inquiry into Electronic Patient Records.

You can find the new information here.

You can find a lot more background information on the UK National Programme for IT initiative pulled together by Dr. Randell and his colleagues here.

It would be nice to have a similar broad and deep information clearing house regarding the pros and cons of the US electronic health record initiative. Any takers?

I have long argued that the IT community needs to separate IT failures from blunders.

Most organizations do not have enough IT project failures. The reason I say this is that, in my experience, most project cancellations (or escalations for that matter) are not true failures but instead represent blunders. There is a big difference. A project failure is one in which most project decisions and actions were correct at the time, but for some reason the project didn't work out. It is a professional project -- the project risks were assessed, managed, and accepted where required; the assumptions were checked; success criteria were defined; the plan was estimated and funded well; the stakeholders participated; and so on.

Project blunders, which I contend most project overruns and cancellations are, arise from Dilbert-like approaches to project management and implementation. There is little or no risk management, the project plan is a fantasy, stakeholder concerns are given short shrift, and on and on.

Well, in a distressingly familiar story in today's LA Times, yet another IT blunder is described. The lede paragraph reads as follows:

Since launching a $95-million computer system six months ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District has been beset by programming glitches, hardware crashes and mistakes by hurriedly trained clerical staff. The result: tens of thousands of teachers, cafeteria workers, classroom aides and others have been underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all.

Sounds like a blunder to me.

Let's see, there are some 14,500 school districts in the United States, along with over 4,000 colleges and universities. I would guess, 99.9% have automated payroll systems. I would also hazard that packaged payroll systems have been around since the mid-1960s - the LA's own payroll system has been around since 1967 or so.

And yet, after all this experience, a school system - even as large as LA's with 100,000 employees - cannot get a payroll system to work properly? INEXCUSABLE.

When the problems first appeared, it was claimed that only a small percentage of employees were affected. Now it looks like about 50% have been affected - so much for the effectiveness of their system testing.

"Let me apologize officially for this failure.There is no excuse for it. I apologize to anyone who has been hurt by this, " so said LA's school district Supt. David L. Brewer.

An apology, not matter how sincere, won't pay the bills. And LA taxpayers should refuse to pay for this IT blunder either.

I don't know how I missed it, but the Humane Society of the United Sates has been extremely successful at getting states, and now it looks like the Federal government, to outlaw Internet hunting via H.R. 2711, the Computer-Assisted Remote Hunting Act.

According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required), the Humane Society has been mailing people "an urgent message, underlined and in bold type":

Such horrific cruelty must stop and stop now.

No debate there - except, as the WSJ article points out, no one is actually hunting using the Net, even though the Humane Society's site implies that it is rampant.

Better safe than sorry, I guess.

However, there is story in the September 2007 issue of National Defense magazine about armed robots being sent into the streets of Baghdad this summer.

Based on the Talon robot platform built by Foster-Miller of Waltham, Massachusetts, three SWORD (special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system) robots outfitted with M249 light machine guns and remotely controlled by an individual soldier are being put through their paces hunting insurgent snipers and such.

I wonder if H.R. 2711, the Computer-Assisted Remote Hunting Act outlaws hunting using remotely controlled robots - if not, the Humane Society better get cracking - but I predict that it is only a matter of time before there is Internet insurgent hunting with or without robots.

Two anniversary's were observed in past two weeks. Twenty-five years ago, on 17 August 1982, the first compact discs containing Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony were mass produced. By 1986, CD players outsold record players, and by 1988, there were more CD sales then record sales. CD sales reached their peak in 2001 with 712 million sold, but pressure from other formats like MP3 has cut CD sales by 25% by 2007.

Then thirty years ago, on 24 August 1977, RCA announced a suggested retail price of $1,000 for its VBT200 VHS VCR to be marketed in the US. This price point - and a fortuitous set of circumstances that created the slogan "Four hours, $1,000, SelectaVision" explained here and here helped propel the VHS format tapes into the lead over Betamax.

The rapidity of change should remind us of how fragile our history has become - I wonder how many recordings have been made on only one type of format in the past thirty years and in fifty years (or sooner) will be lost forever. The US Library of Congress has as National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), but as has been noted,

Current estimates are that in 2006, 161 billion trillion bytes -- 161 exabytes -- of digital data were generated in the world -- equivalent to 12 stacks of books reaching from the Earth to the sun. In just 15 minutes, the world produces an amount of data equal to all the information held at the Library of Congress.

I wonder if that number includes family digital photos and movies?

The US Department of Defense announced that it was shutting down its controversial Talon data gathering program.

Talon was established in 2002 by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz as a way to collect and evaluate information about possible threats to U.S. servicemembers and defense civilians at stateside and overseas military installations. It is being closed because reporting to the system had declined significantly, and it was determined to no longer be of analytical value, said Army Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.

A reason for its shut down was noted in an article in Government Executive,

A June 2007 report by the Defense Department's inspector general found that counterintelligence officials "maintained TALON reports without determining whether information on organizations and individuals should be retained for law enforcement and force-protection purposes."

In addition, the article notes that:

To ensure a mechanism to document and examine potential threats, Assistant Defense Secretary Paul McHale plans to propose a new, streamlined reporting system that can better meet the Pentagon's needs, an agency press release said. In the interim, Defense Department officials will send information pertaining to protection concerns to the FBI's Web-based threat tracking system.

What a "streamlined reporting system" means hasn't been explained, but past history says don't place bets that it isn't going to resemble a data vacuum cleaner.