Low Clearance Ahead: Can Predictable IT Crashes Be Avoided?

Just how many warnings are needed to prevent an accident? Apparently for many driving trucks and RVs under the Norfolk Southern–Gregson Street Overpass in Durham, North Carolina, multiple low-clearance signs, an LED warning sign, and ashing lights aren’t enough. Since 2008, the 11-foot, 8-inch bridge— nicknamed the “Can Opener” for the numerous vehicle tops it has sheared oŠ —has been the site of more than 110 height-related accidents.1 Drivers who have slammed into the bridge routinely claim they never saw the warnings.2 Over the past several years, a steady stream of IT projects, especially in government, have similarly ignored multiple warnings not to launch and have ended up crashing into their own analogous can openers. In some cases, like the Canadian government’s new C$309.5 million Phoenix payroll system that went live in February 2016, the costs of repairing the resulting wreckage are exceeding the costs of development.3 Phoenix has for well over a year managed to botch the payments of more than 150,000 Canadian government workers, or about half.4 As of the end of July 2017, there was still a backlog of some 228,000 improper payments needing to be sorted out.5 Eliminating the backlog will take some time, since nearly as many new cases of improper payments are occurring as are being cleared up. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau belatedly admitted that his government “didn’t pay enough attention to the challenges and the warning signs on the transition we were overseeing.”6 After originally promising that the payroll system would be ž xed by October 2016, the government is now expecting—or perhaps hoping—that Phoenix will rise from the ashes sometime in 2019.7,8 The Phoenix ž asco is by no means unique. For instance, who can forget the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, Low Clearance Ahead: Can Predictable IT Crashes Be Avoided?