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Credit: Springer GmbH
Television commercials advertise sleek new tablet computers and tout these devices as close to computer nirvanas. While these tablet computers receive extensive media coverage, Derek Partridge's new book The Seductive Computer - Why IT Systems Always Fail chronicles myriad extensive IT projects that promised amazing results yet ended in confusing failure.
Some of the ill-fated IT projects or unexpected computer failures that Partridge chronicles in The Seductive Computer, include:
-- On October 14, 1989, air-traffic controllers at Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport tried to adapt for a heavy day of air traffic by adding computer power to the air-traffic controller computer system. Instead of helping, the computers crashed and had to be restarted - leaving air-traffic controllers scrambling for 30 minutes to manage airplane traffic safely.
-- In March 2009, the UK government abandoned a computer system initially designed to track prisoners from sentence to release. At the time of cancellation, the project was 2 years behind schedule, and the original cost estimated at £234 million had skyrocketed to £690 million.
Partridge illustrates in a simple yet thorough manner the underlying concepts necessary for understanding the IT-system crisis - not 'How To Program' but what the demands of programming are. He then proceeds to lay out the full gamut of issues - all stemming from the nature of the technology.
From development to maintenance, IT-system personnel are grappling with incipient chaos. The technicians are seduced by the detailed challenge of the technology. The scientists are seduced by the promises of their technology. The managers and users are seduced by the mysteries of the technology. No IT system is ever fully understood by anyone, so surprising behaviours will always emerge.
What can be done? The expectations of IT systems must be reined in: what they can do, and how reliably they can do it. On the positive side, The Seductive Computer discusses novel paradigms that look beyond the current discrete technology: neural computing and precise approximation computing.
Derek Partridge gained his PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College, London in 1972. For the next 15 years he worked as a researcher and a teacher in universities around the world --- Africa, Australia, Malaysia, and Chile but primarily in the USA. In 1987 he returned to the UK to the Chair of Computer Science at Exeter University. He has published more than one hundred articles on artificial intelligence and software engineering as well as numerous books, one of which was translated into French, German and Italian. He retired from the University of Exeter in 2008, and now reads, writes and manages his private nature reserve on the edge of Dartmoor National Park in Devon.
Derek Partridge
The Seductive Computer - Why IT Systems Always Fail
2011, 323 pages, 56 illustrations, 6 in color.
Softcover € 49,95, $59.95, £39.95
ISBN 978-1-84996-497-5