NZ's top 5 tech disasters
"Next IT disaster the $1 billion IRD upgrade ... someone is milking us at a level that is just ridiculous."
Featured commentThe Wheedle/listselltrade fiasco got me thinking: what have been NZ’s top five tech disasters?
Five that have to make any shortlist:
INCIS: The $110 million Integrated National Crime Information System was abandoned in 1999. The document management system upgrade was only partially completed before the police and IBM parted ways. The project, $40 million over budget, became a case study in mismanagement, and inflated expectations.
It also shows how tricky it is to pick a winner in any technology race. Even if everything had gone swimmingly, people would have soon been sucking their teeth at Incis’ OS/2 and Lotus Notes setup.
YELLOW: The directory started post-Telecom life in 2007 with a website that delivered the vaguest of results, then took years to complete an upgrade (finally completed in 2011). Pity it was up against Google. As Yellow’s marketing director said on TVNZ7’s The Ad Show in July 2010: “People actually race up to me on the street and say, ‘Do you know your product doesn’t work?’ And it’s like stating the obvious, really.”) Throw in the 018 outsourcing to Manila (phone queries involving Maori place names - what could possibly go wrong?) and brand suffered major damage.
THE XT LAUNCH: A rushed launch caused problems that Telecom is still paying for today as Vodafone maintains a solid lead in mobile market share.
BUBBLE: In 2007, there was confusion and chaos as Telecom migrated around 800,000 customers from its inhouse webmail system to XtraBubble, hosted by Yahoo in Sydney. There have been intermittent problems with Telecom’s webmail ever since, including multiple instances of delayed messages and other glitches over the past year, and just last week for some customers. Meanwhile, Telecom's Australian subsidiary, AAPT, moved customers to Google Apps and Gmail.
UFB CONNECTION COSTS: The Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) rollout has stalled amid a standoff over who pays for connecting fibre from the kerb to a home – especially given many homes are further back from the road than the minimum distance Chorus is obliged to cover. ISPs want Chorus (responsible for 80% of the project by premise) to extend its free connection deal beyond the end of this year, fearing – quite correctly – that consumers will take fright if asked to stump up hundreds or thousands of dollars, on an open-ended tab, for a fibre connection. Will the load spread? Will taxpayers have to chip in more? Confusion reigns. No one thought this part of the project through. That’s why, so far, there’s only a handful of connections to show for the government’s $1.35 billion contribution to the UFB.
What else? F&P's Dish Drawer has to be a contender.
So does the Auckland Transport/Thales vs Snapper Auckland e-ticketing disaster (and I can's say I'm overly impressed with the Auckland Transport/Thales/Telecom mobile payment project that's betting against Apple, and the likes of superhot NFC-killer Square. Again, why trying to pick a winner, or guess where technology might be in 18 months?).
Then there was TiVo with its Caspa download service that didn't work - with no one at TVNZ, Telecom or Hybrid TV particularly bothered about its failings (I was also shocked to talk to Telecom's then head of retail and realise he didn't actually realise the practical impact of no Prime EPG. I guess that's human frailty and poor management rather than a technical issue per se - but then again you could say that about practically any item on the list above).
Obvious lessons are:
1. Like an extension on your house, an IT project always takes twice as long, and costs twice as much, as you think.
2. Don't rush things, especially in the test phase.
3. Eat your own dog food (hello managers involved with TiVo, watcing your MySky boxes).
4. First mover advantage doesn't count for anything if the technology doesn't work
What would you add to the list? Leave your suggestions below.
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Comments and questions49
Another win for Mr Keall for having the spine to keep reminding the suffering taxpayer & clients of the waste and ongoing floundering those a party to these c*ck ups manage. The extraodinary thing is that organisations would happily hide the truth and some careers are even enhanced from being part of the team that failed, go figure. Looking forward to your top 10 list, lots of candidates.
I'd add iphone owners to the mix. Suddenly everyone who owns an iphone is a tech guru and a very opinionated (but more often than not are poorly informed)..... I'd also add the Vodafone mobile network which is a trainwreck for a very large number of people (how many times have you had a call drop dead crossing the harbour bridge?)
iPhone users? What a dork.
Yes iPhone users are as annoying as Happy clapping Jesus freaks and Jehovah's Witnesses, for very similar reasons.
Do you use your cell-phone while driving? Norty
He is using Blue Tooth.
The Auckland city council sap system, and the 're-write' rather than re-use.
Wheedle seems to be a strong, or at least topical, contender......
So many... where to start? In no particular order:
* Walker Wireless - Woosh, which used dead-end WCDMA tech.
* Indra Net. Last I heard the "mesh networking" company had branched out into cars powered by compressed air in India. Would be interesting to hear Amy Adams views on Indra Net, actually.
* BCL - Kordia Extend. Apparently, $100 million was spent on that "nationwide broadband network".
* A list like this is not complete without Ferrit, the Original Trade Me Killer.
* Pacific Fibre. Crashing and burning before the project gets off the ground is no mean feat.
* Telecom's 027 voice mail vulnerability that meant everyone could listen in on government ministers and The Cupboard's messages.
* TiVo. What was that about?
* Telecom's video calling service that sank without a trace. What was it called again?
Re video calling service, I believe it was called Ojo: http://www.snapvrs.com/phones/
That's the one, thanks.
Surely Indranet gets filed under scam rather than tech fail. did they ever demo anything?
Not sure if this is deployed: http://www.indranet.co.nz/communications-xidc89822.html ... but I'm sure at least some people there believed the tech worked.
Woosh I don't think a technical fail. Picked the wrong wireless technology, and lost a lot of investor money, but the service has always worked okay-ish.
As a long term Woosh user, I beg to differ... the service (TD-CDMA, not WCDMA as I wrote before) was really quite unreliable. Surely picking the wrong tech counts as a tech failure?
like any wireless tech if you are in a marginal coverage area it will be somewhat flakey. That woosh took a lot of short cuts when building the network probably doesnt help your experience any.
Ironically woosh now survive by reselling DSL
Hehehe well called juha. What was that video calling service called? It worked really well except that Motorola canned it in the US (where its servers were located) so Telecom had no choice but to ditch it... I think the pervading theme here is that the devil is in the detail with much of these.
A few years ago there was a GPS navigation product called Goldfinger that was supposed to steal the NZ market from Navman and TomTom. Anyone heard from them recently?
What was that e-tail site before Ferrit called? Flyiing Pig? Around dot-com boom time.
Ferrit was a disaster - I think the problem there was that it was seen as a great idea even though no one really had a clear vision of what it was to achieve.....Besides playing a niche in a niche economy is always going to result in failure
Also that Telecom/EDS/Microsoft joint venture apps-on-tap sort of thing around 2000? What was it called? Sort of like SaaS/Cloud before its time, before broadband caught up
eSolutions
Next IT disaster the $1 billion IRD upgrade...
As an IT professional i can even fathom how you could spend that much.
even 500 million would be excessive. I dont care if you had to replace every single PC and server in the organisation it just doesnt add up.
someone is milking us at a level that is just ridiculous.
You are so right .. this will make INCIS look like a triumph of planning, organisation and foresight.
The massively inflated budget (which will no doubt be less than half of the eventual cost) is ludicrous - but it wll look good on the project managers' CVs and give everyone including ministers bragging rights at overseas conferences.
We also need to add ACC to the list - millions being squandered every year on zombie projects that suck up huge amounts of money whilst going nowhere.
Jetstar's computer's missing daylight savings probably isn't one of the top 5 worst tech disasters.
Lamestar!!!
What was Boags effort ? And Marc Ellis? Smaller by comparison, but still.
Michelle Boag was one of the backers of iYomu - a kind of Facebook for adults that launched in 2007.
It said it was going to give away $1 million in a loyalty competition, but it eventually ran out of cash and folded (most adults, already using the actual Facebook, didn't even notice).
A financial flop, but it never technically failed. And remember this was the early days of social networks, so it was arguably worth a stab. Just.
Mark Ellis backed one of those sites where you can become a guinea pig for companies floating marketing concepts, or running surveys, in exchange for rewards. Again there wasn't any technical issue (that I'm aware of). It just never caught on with the great New Zealand public.
Yes there was. You could game the votes/views by simply submitting as custom form variables. Something that any script kiddie could do.
Paul Reynolds certainly freeloaded while he was here. A disaster no less.
eSolutions was the name...........
Flying Pig didn't disaappoint, living up to its name.
Kachingo
one of the successes has to be the NBR comments section - its always been such a vibrant place
What about Vodafones project Sam. Another IBM deal. Rumors are of 600mill + spent and it many years late vs budget if 200m. And basically a big flop. Plenty of articles on Computerworld about it
TelstraClear's T-Box was a pretty clear case of too much development time ruining what could have been a good product. (And when it was finally released, it didn't work.) If they'd released it in 2008 or 2009, it might have mattered.
Also with TelstraClear, the Unplugged project in Tauranga was a colossal waste of money. It was never going to happen because TCL never got the agreements it needed to have with Vodafone in writing before spending millions on it.
The big failure, I think, has been UCLL though. Should have changed the industry, but it was too complicated, too manual for telcos, too expensive, and too poorly managed by Telecom to succeed.
What is really sad about the T-Box is how Telstra tries to hide that it is a dog with fleas. Search the Telstra website for any mention of T-Box problems and you find zip. Yet there is a thread on Geekzone that is not over 100 pages long (count'em, more than 100!!) detailing the endless problems and Trelstra's glacially slow progress at finding and fixing the faults.
The saddest thing about that thread? There is a lurker from Telstra who periodically weighs in with good news about the latest fix - and we are all SO GRATEFUL for a little piece of information.
Gets my prize for a tech fail!!
I object to Pacific Fibre being cited in this list. Hats off to the entrepreneurs behind PF for giving it a go. The challenge of raising the immense amount of capital required was always going to be tough, but well done for giving it a credible go.
I agree, they failed commercially because the recumbent shareholds wanted to much and expected he new shareholders to shoulder all the risk, there was tons of capital/money. The (later) exec team did an awesome job of signing some great cornerstone tenants.
Localist - NZ Post's attempt to get into the hyperlocal Yelp space. Interesting no media has reported on how many millions it has cost the taxpayer and reported the admission its being flicked - a statement a few weeks ago said (when you read through the PR spin) it is now being flicked off to any private entrepreneur to take it off the government's hands. Good idea, no business case.
Unfortunately, NZ just isn’t innovative when it comes to IT. Couple this with a significant lack of ability to execute and it’s no wonder most IT projects fail. Our depth and breadth of talent is marginal at best and the projects listed above are just the high profile ones. Partly to blame is the sub-standard quality of IT companies but probably more so is the approach taken by CIO’s and IT Managers who don’t quite understand what the “I” stands for in their title.
There is some talent out there but you need to look for it. You won’t find it in big brand IT companies who are just flag wavers in NZ. You also won’t find excellence through the tender process or issuing RFP’s. The private & public sector needs to rethink how they approach technology.
And don't forget Telecom spending a couple of billion on buying AAPT and then selling it for about a tenth of that..
or Air NZ buying Ansett - Hmm the Aussies must have a great number on dodgy due dilligence
oh and NZoom, what happened to that - what a shame that it is now part of the trainwreck that is TVNZ
and the saddest part of all this - never EVER any accountability and action in holding those responsible to account! remind me again now from any of these candidates how many fired/removed/charged with fraud, whichever appropriate?
What about Telecoms original decision to go CDMA rather than GSM when they went from 025 to 027 against the world flow meaning they had to then go to XT and close a 2nd network!
In retrospect, yes. And arguably Telecom clung to CDMA for too long.
But a decade and a half ago, it wasn't clear in which direction the world would head. All carriers were taking a punt, and it was reasonable to think CDMA's heavy US presence could see it carrying the day.
At the time I was told by Telecom's mobile head (Jeff Carter) that they went CDMA because Bell South went GSM, and they didn't want to make it easy for customers to switch.
You can add the Ministry of Education's Novopay system to the list - it's quite funny seeing the emails flying backwards and forwards between schools and the provider - but the fun ain't going to last long and it's already well over budget
Lets not forget the Government Shared Network (GSN), an attempt to build an in-house government network. It was a model that had failed every time overseas governments tried it. The story still swirls around Wellington, how a certain consultancy made $8m from the GSN fiasco and how one staffer was even assaulted (I wonder how much that cost the taxpayer to hush up) and how many of the people who screwed up GSN went straight on to the UFB jobby. No wonder UFB looks like going the same way as GSN.
The person above who commented on the lack of IT and and project professionalism in NZ hit the nail on the head.