Recent Failures and Success of Information Technology Based Systems in 2010
Tiaj-Soroiya Wright
In the recent years information technology has come a long way and still has some way to go. A failure in information technology base systems affects everyone from schools, to home, and even the government. The Washington Post posted an article addressing the crash of Virginia’s computer networking system. A computer networking is when “two or more computers connected so that they can communicate with each other and share information, software, peripheral devices, and/ or processing power” (Haag & Cummings, 2010, p.409). The crash of the computer networking started with the failure of one of the network systems data storage unit, which was a single pair of three year old memory card (Helderman & Kumar, 2010). Even though the memory cards were hardware, in information technology, they caused many networked department in the state of Virginia to crash. The failure resulted into a potential economical and political failure.
The potential economical failures came into play when the states Department of Social Service had to work through the weekend to ensure that 380,000 residents did not go without food stamps and welfare checks (Helderman & Kumar, 2010). Veterans Services could not pay their bills and the Department of Taxation could not gain access to taxpayers account to refund taxes (Helderman & Kumar, 2010). The Department of Motor Vehicles estimated that 45,000 Virginia residents were not able to renew their driver’s licenses (Helderman & Kumar, 2010). The outage of computers was a week; therefore the state had to lose money because of this outage.
The failure caused political issues in the state. First, the government is expected to maintain departments that deal with the welfare of its residents, departments of services having an outage is seen as a political issue weather it was the information technology team or not. Second, the standing governor, Governor, Robert F. McDonnell (R) was criticized by the states democratic party of continuing a contract with the states information technology team (Northorp Grumman) in the amount of 2.4 billion (Helderman & Kumar, 2010).
To find this article I searched Google under the key words computer networking failures 2010. The source came from the internet. It was a news article find on the Washington Post website. The Washington Post is a well known news paper. The source featured dates in which the article was published and the authors that wrote the article. The authors are creditable authors of the Washington Post. The article is well structured with no grammar issues, and includes statistical facts on the issues in Virginia.
A succeeding Information technology based system would be that of IBM’s launch of the Coremetrics Lifecycle for Deep online marketing. The whole idea of the system has to do with IBM’s operation of a Smarter Commerce system. This system is a type of electronic technology, electronic technology or e-commerce “ is commerce, but it is commerce accelerated and enhanced by IT, in particular the internet. E-commerce enables customers, consumers, and companies to form powerful new relationships that would not be possible without the enabling technologies” (Haag & Cummings, 2010, p.128). With the Smarter Commerce software IBM has been able to focus on the B2B (business to Business) and B2C (business to consumer) markets. The success is completely economical. The success to the Smarter commerce software has the potential of making $20 billion in sales, which in completely a economical gain for IBM (Roe, 2010).
I believe that IT industry learns from its mistakes just like any other professional industry that exist. For example look at the failure story of Virginia’s computer networking system. Because of the failure people where looking for someone to blame. It came down to who created the memory card; the company who created the memory card had a very good reputation. But this one failure could ruin their name in the IT industry. Keeping a good reputation and a good product is very important in maintaining business. Without good maintenance, there will be no money. The amount of money that is paid for IT is very high, so there is a even higher expectation towards the IT industry. So when failures happen they get worked on and fixed to maintain the company, its business, and are industry.
Reference
Haag and Cummings (2010), Management information for the information age; Eighth edition, McGraw-Hill Pub
Helderman and Kumar (2010),Crash of Va. computer network has implications for tech world, state politics, Washington Post. Retrived from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/01/AR2010090106480.html
Roe, D (2010), Ibm launches coremetrics lifecycle for deep online marketing, Retrieved from
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/ibm-launches-coremetrics-lifecycle-for-deep-online-marketing-011137.php
Appendix A: Grading Criteria
Requirements / Maximum Points / Your PointsPART 1
a.. / 3
b / 7
c. / 3
d. / 5
PART 2
a. / 3
b. / 7
PART 3 / 2
TOTAL / 30