Why ict systems fail

In the example of the asylum system the purpose of the system, to provide ports access to home office files is discounted for half of all the ports as reported by Travis This Poor fit is thus making the system, that is supposed to be operating on a national scale, be available for only around half of the ports which it needs to be operating in to be effective.

Thus due to this failure the scope of the project is significantly diminished. This failure and other flaws revealed in the report by FT management consultants from which Travis quotes, could cause the British tax payer an additional five hundred million pounds.

These failures are those that are primarily caused by hardware faults or by the entity not having the resources necessary to make the specified system usable. At this the conclusion of the report I feel that I have shown numerous examples of System failure and have related them to their underlying cause Section 2. These underlying factors have been then classified into three general areas Section 3.

As such measures to reduce poor development practices must centre on the development team itself. Fear of management reprisal is a common excuse sited by those who fail to report possible problems which would delay the project, as stated in a report found on the web site of the state university of New Jersey.

Review by peers when implemented will increase the likelihood of logical errors being spotted before the implementation of the system. Failing to stick to the required specification is a major mistake. If the system does not produce the results expected then it is useless for the required tasks. A potential problem occurs in the development of a system when a programmer needs to implement obscure specification criteria.

If clarification is not sought then guesswork on the part of the programmer can lead to unwanted results being generated by the system, and thus cause system failure. This policy of reviewing documentation will ensure that the users are given clear and concise instructions on how to operate the system, and will eliminate failures caused by users following erroneous instructions. This point is made by an article by Charles B.

Kreitzberg, Ph. System failures, which would come under this classification, are those failures for which the entity that is going to be utilising the system is responsible. Therefore to minimise the frequency of this type of error occurring certain actions must be taken by the entity. In a report by Centre for Human-Computer Studies, Uppsala University, the point is made that specifications need to be prepared and reviewed by those who will be utilising the systems.

Training is one of the factors highlighted by Charles B. Krietzig, which will reduce chaos in implementing computer systems. About this free course 9 hours study. Level 3: Advanced. Course rewards. Free statement of participation on completion of these courses. Create your free OpenLearn profile. Course content Course content. Successful IT systems Start this free course now. Free course Successful IT systems. Previous Learning outcomes. Next 1. Print Print.

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Our partners OpenLearn works with other organisations by providing free courses and resources that support our mission of opening up educational opportunities to more people in more places. Millions of TSB customers were locked out of their accounts after an IT upgrade led to an online banking outage.

A planned system upgrade was expected to shut internet and mobile banking services down for one weekend in April , but ended up causing months of disruption. Immediately after the new system was switched on, many customers experienced problems logging in, while others were shown details from other people's accounts or inaccurate credits and debits on their own.

Customers remained locked out of their accounts two weeks after the initial outage. In July, TSB was still working its way through the backlog of complaints, when another outage struck, locking customers out of their online accounts once again.

TSB claimed that the problem was resolved later that day, but the debacle will further rupture the bank's relationship with parent company Sabadell. In , doctors and hospital staff of the Wales NHS experienced a widespread computer failure that led to them being unable to access patient files. According to the National Cyber Security Centre, the failure was due to technical issues as opposed to a cyber attack yet it still caused wide disruption as GPs were unable to access blood and X-Ray results.

It also caused a backlog as patients could not be contacted to cancel appointments, and notes could not be typed up and saved on NHS systems. At the start of , Google researchers revealed CPU hardware vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre had affected almost all computers on the market.

Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers that discovered the flaw at Graz University of Technology described Meltdown as "one of the worst CPU bugs ever found". Although these are both primarily hardware vulnerabilities, they communicate with the operating system to access locations in its memory space.

Read next: Meltdown and Spectre chip flaw timeline. Meltdown, Google explains , "breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system. This allows a program to access the memory, and also the secrets, of other programs and the operating system. Spectre meanwhile "breaks the isolation between different applications" — "it allows an attacker to trick error-free programs, which follow best practices, into leaking their secrets.

The attack was due to vulnerabilities found in Microsoft operating systems installed in millions of computers around the world. See also: WannaCry ransomware timeline. According to Microsoft, the Windows versions that were vulnerable to the attack were versions which were no longer supported by Microsoft such as Windows 8 and Windows XP, which the NHS trusts and affected companies seemed to be running.

In February , Cloudflare faced a major software bug that led to sensitive customer data like passwords, cookies and authentication tokens to get leaked from customer websites. Cloudflare is known to provide performance and security services to millions of customer websites and although the bug was patched within hours, it is expected that the data leakage could have started as early as September Bitcoin Unlimited suffered a serious memory leak which caused several nodes to fall from to about This is almost 70 percent of the nodes run by Bitcoin Unlimited at the time.

Although the memory leak was patched fairly quickly, this appeared to be the third memory leakage to crash the preferred method for Bitcoin Unlimited. For the sixth time in a year, British Airways faced a massive global IT failure which led to the airline cancelling all flights from Heathrow and Gatwick in May The IT failure affected over 1, flights, British Airways call centres, the website and mobile app.

Nest said the fault had been caused by a December 4. It has since rolled out a 4. Millions of the bank's customers were unable to access online accounts. Services only returned to normal after a two-day outage. In December a glitch caused more than 3, US prisoners to be released early.

According to reports, the problem has been ongoing for 13 years until a new IT boss was appointed and informed the governor's office. It is estimated that on average prisoners were released 49 days early. HSBC again! In August a reported , individual payments failed to be processed by HSBC, which left many potentially without pay before the Bank Holiday weekend. The cause of this major failure was a problem with its electronic payment system for its business banking users which affected salary payments.

Bacs is the payment system that is used for payment processes across the UK is reported to have picked up on the issue but noted that it was an 'isolated issue'. Hence when an IT project fails — which still happens in this day and age — it can be disastrous. Like all projects, IT projects can fail. However, with the stakes getting increasingly higher, the failure of an IT project can be catastrophic for all concerned.

Here we outline five reasons why such projects fail. This is perhaps the frequent reason why projects fail, and may manifest itself as unclear project requirements or scope of work, and as a result, there is a gap between what has been specified, and the problem that needs to be solved.

However, little or no consideration is given to the desired output, which in fact may be different, and is not satisfied by the specifications prepared. While the changes might be necessary to accommodate a constraint under which the project, and by extension the organisation must operate — such as budget — it can mean that the project can no longer be executed in its entirety as initially specified, and ultimately, the modified version is doomed to failure.

Although it is rarely acknowledged, most projects are executed under some kind of constraint. The most prevalent one tends to be financial, particularly in the form of underestimated costs.

However, projects can also fail due to inadequate resources, overly aggressive timelines, overlooked requirements and unanticipated complications, to name a few.