ICT failures: whose fault is it now?
Now that 15 New Zealand government websites have been restored after last week's upgrade blunder, the finger pointing can begin at yet another government IT failure. But where?
It's a bit like playing pass the parcel with a bomb. When the music stops, no-one wants to be left holding the Semtex! Someone, somewhere must face the music. But who?
The website failure has been branded an "international embarrassment", as companies could not file their records.
The ubiquitous David Farrar of Kiwiblog said it was a "disgrace" that the government websites had been down for four days. They were eventually restored on Wednesday night, after initially going down the weekend before.
As one of the country's respected internet gurus, Farrar is involved with Internet New Zealand and similar organisations. In his blog, he recalled a former role as a director of the New Zealand Domain Registry Service (NZRS), saying that if there been an unscheduled outage for four days at NZRS when he was there, heads would have rolled, with himself also offering to resign.
Farrar demanded an independent inquiry, and the Commerce Minister Simon Power, who declared the failures an "operational matter", has said that there will be an investigation. The ministry may even seek compensation from its suppliers.
Such ICT failures seem to be becoming commonplace, especially within government. It was just months back when the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) canned a $21 million project, suggesting that the government has learned little in making people accountable, and in preventing disaster.
Of course, the IRD's $21 million is chickenfeed compared to the many billions wasted during the tenure of the former Labour government in Britain over the now-canned information system for its National Health Service. Naturally, no heads have rolled there, either.
New Zealand saw failures on Telecom's XT network two years ago, something that Alcatel seemed to carry the can for, while its departing boss Paul Reynolds did well in salvaging the company's reputation.
In an age of ever-increasing government and political involvement, greater and more complicated outsourcing arrangements and supplies coming from more diverse sources, pointing the finger becomes all the more harder.
Sadly, such increasingly murkier lines of responsibility make it more likely that projects and upgrades will fail, as last week's government website outages have so clearly shown.