By Art Gillis

I’ve been hearing that excuse less and less each year. In 1960 I used to say it to our customers, which included General Motors, Met Life, Delco Remy, National Institutes of Health, Army Map Service and some other biggies. What made it tough for me was I was in charge of software releases for a major mainframe (was there any other kind then?) company. Hardware was the only thing we sold. Software was a giveaway. But nothing would run without the software and I couldn’t release the software until it was tested. And I needed a working computer to test it. I apologized a lot. And I worked the graveyard shift a lot because I could scrounge time on any Honeywell 800 computer I could find in the Boston area. Fortunately I was single at the time and no one was looking for me at 3 a.m.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any girl friends at the time because decent girls were usually at work at 3 p.m. when I would gain consciousness. I was the ultimate nerd before the word was even invented.
Over the years, I had experienced so many disappointing events in the implementation of IT projects, that in 1992 I wrote a little book about 43 of them. The title was, "Sorry, Our Computers Are Down.”

Here’s just one example: The FDA hired us (a major consulting firm) to develop an information system that would better use the resources of food inspectors in the field. It was in vogue then to budget according to program goals. As it was explained to me by the FDA, if rat terds in bread are sterilized during the baking process, why should our inspectors waste their time looking for rat terds? I stopped eating bread after that and now enjoy a 34-inch waist line. We built the specs for that system in 1969 and charged the FDA $1 million. Right after that, the Nixon Administration came to power. A new FDA Commissioner took over and proclaimed our system as impractical. Nineteen volumes of systems specs were trashed, and if you paid taxes in 1970, you have a right to bitch to your Congressman for waste in the Federal Government. For all my Republican friends, take comfort in the fact that change can be good. A Democratic Congress may just be the solution to solving a stupid decision to go to war in Iraq.

These days, reliability of technology is a lot better. For example, I heard the excuse this morning from a company that couldn’t schedule my semi-annual heating system maintenance. No problem, it was only about the fifth time I heard the excuse from a variety of service companies all year.

For a world that now relies on real-time action, the bad news is that 99.999999 up time just ain’t good enough.

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