Glitches like these, Papows insists, result from shoddy software development approaches. Software development today, as it has always been, operates essentially the way it did when programmable computers first arrived on the scene decades ago. Skilled or not-so-skilled software engineers, programmers, and developers build the software by hand. Attempts at methodical governance and systematic automation of the process are the exception rather than the rule. There are maturity models and frameworks aplenty, but mostly they are ignored in practice.
Papows sees it as a software error: “It’s a breakdown in the quality of the underlying software systems.” Somebody, a programmer, created the glitch, probably inadvertently, and no process caught it.
Meanwhile, the amount of software required is spiraling to stratospheric levels. Companies are computerizing more processes, instrumenting more, generating vastly more data, and analyzing data more than ever before.
What, then, can the CFO do to avoid risky and potentially costly software glitches? Building on Papows’ insistence on the importance of IT governance, wiredFINANCE suggests five action items:
That was the amount a young man was charged on his debit card when he purchased a pack of cigarettes. You knew smoking was bad for you, but not that bad. Obviously, a mistake that egregious did not require an army of lawyers to untangle, but it still took a few days to straighten out. For CFOs, the question should arise: What far less obvious but possibly more damaging mistakes are being made by your IT systems, and what can you do about it? Papows offers some answers.
It would be nice if such mistakes were caused by some random instance of, say, stray voltage that caused the computer to hiccup. Hey, lights flicker; why shouldn’t a decimal point jump a dozen or so places?
Frequently, it isn’t minor. Jeff Papows, CEO of WebLayers, a software company, and author of the book Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software, likes to tell the story of the $23,148,855,308,184,500 computer glitch. Just so you know that it’s not a typo, Papows spells it out in words, too: twenty-three quadrillion, one h hundred forty-eight trillion, eight hundred fifty-five billion, three hundred eight million, one hundred eighty-four thousand, five hundred dollars (no cents).
Software today is riddled with the kinds of errors that cause things like this to happen. They surface all the time as mistakes on financial statements, airline delays, lost parcels, missed payroll checks, and even — one of the most ominous of the recent glitches — the loss of power to the controllers at a U.S. missile launch command, which left a large chunk of our nation’s defenses inoperable for almost an hour.
Purchasing commercial software Big Fat Finance, outsourcing, and adopting SaaS can help, mainly by removing one layer from the problem. But that doesn’t guarantee glitch-free software. ###
Have you ever been told that a problem is just a software glitch? Sort of makes the problem, whatever it was, seem minor.
1. Adopt IT quality and governance frameworks like ITIL, Cobit, and the Capabilities Maturity Model.
2. Invest in automated tools to automate software development.
3. Automate software testing and quality assurance.
4. Raise the stature of IT governance and automate it.
5. Lock down IT security.
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