The first key step was buying a Windows Home Server box last summer. It took me a while to get all the kinks out (read my review at the link), but since then it was worked pretty much trouble-free, 24/7. Not only do my various computers get backed up each night, but it’s become the standard iTunes repository for both my wife and me, and we use it to share (legally) media that we purchase separately on iTunes.

The next step was upgrading our internet access. We live in a semi-rural area outside of Denver, and when we moved here 6 years ago, our only internet access options were a dedicated T1 line (our next-door neighbor had one), satellite access, or a wide-area wireless (with dedicated dish pointing to an access point about 6 miles away). We went with the last option, which was given us roughly DSL-grade access (1.5Mb). However, about six months ago, we started getting flyers from Qwest claiming that high-speed phone line access was finally available in our area. We signed up and found ourselves with access speeds running typically from 4 to 12 Mbits/sec. Not much compared to some of the very high speed (>100 Mbits) access available in some cities now, but a major step up from what we’ve been living with.

The third step was getting a new HD large-screen TV this past week — in this case, as an astonishingly generous gift from our youngest daughter and her boyfriend. We bought our existing Sony 42″ plasma TV some 8+ years ago, and I won’t tell you what we paid for it then. Not only was it getting long in the tooth, with the display losing contrast, but the TV itself only had one (1) set of component inputs; the other four were all composite/S-video, and there were no HDMI ports at all. The new TV (a 55″ Sony LCD) has a much sharper and clearer picture as well as up-to-date ports (4 HDMI ports, an optical audio out, etc.).

The fourth step was buying an Apple TV unit today. This not only gives us Netflix streaming, it recognizes and lets us access that iTunes media share on our WHS box. [UPDATE: But wait! Not really! See below.] After getting it hooked up, I sat down and watched an episode of “Castle” that I had downloaded from iTunes (and moved onto the server) but had not yet watched.I then listened to some of the music on the server, then went out and connected to one of what appear to be at least a few hundred streaming radio stations from the ‘net. Oh, and I watched a few minutes of both a TV show and a movie from Netflix (we are long-time Netflix subscribers).

To quote the great Steverino, it all just works.  And it works beautifully, too — the video and sound quality is outstanding.

I’ll note in here that a few days ago I bought a Sony Blu-Ray player with ‘net connectivity. It actually sees more of the computer on our home network, but it does not recognize or play iTunes media. If it did, I probably wouldn’t have bought the Apple TV unit.

As per the headline, this is almost enough to persuade me to drop our DirecTV subscription. Almost, but not enough. I love college football and especially love watching it in high-def. I also watch (or at least have on in the background) a lot of local and national news. If and when I have streaming options for those that I like, then DirecTV will likely go away; it’s just not worth the cost.

I give it a year or so.  ..bruce..

UPDATE: Thought I was going crazy there for a while. After seeing the stuff on my WHS box, I went back later and found I could only see stuff on my Win7 laptop (which is where I keep all my ‘active’  iTunes media and where I sync my iPhone and my iPad). I thought maybe I misread what I was seeing, but then I disabled and then re-enabled iTunes sharing on my WHS box, then brought up iTunes on my Win7 laptop. The WHS iTunes library showed up in my laptop’s iTunes app — and now all the media files on my WHS box are showing up as well. But it will only play the files on my laptop. Any attempt to select, say, a TV show episode that’s only on the WHS box results in an error message.

So, I’ve got a couple of choices: install iTunes on my WHS box (which is not as straightforward as I would like) or move all the iTunes media on the WHS box onto Sandra’s MacPro (where her iTunes library resides and which, fortunately, has a couple of terabytes of free internal disk space). Since the Apple TV readily sees her iTunes library, and since her MacPro (unlike my laptop) is almost always on, that may be the easiest solution. Stay tuned.

It didn’t work.The adapter showed up as a network connection, but it was disabled and would not let it self be enabled. I went through some of the usual first steps (uninstall, reboot, re-install), but they didn’t work. I searched the net for newer drivers, and found some — went through the uninstall/reboot/install new drivers cycle. Plugged the USB device it. Same problem. There were comments in some of the on-line forums that this particular adapter didn’t work with Windows 7, so I figured that was likely my problem.

The next day, I stopped by the same store and bought a different USB wireless adapter, this one clearly marketed “Compatible with Windows 7!” Went through the installation cycle, and this one didn’t work either. Looked for newer drivers, found them, downloaded and installed them — still no luck. Used Google to search for similar complaints, and I found them, one of which spoke to my situation. The user had Zone Alarm installed on his system. He said that he had found that he could successfully install the network adapter only if he completely uninstalled Zone Alarm — not just turned it off, but actually uninstalled it — then installed the adapter, then re-installed Zone Alarm. I tried the same thing, and it worked. Of course, as I wrote about two days ago, I then started getting BSODs on my Gateway box, which had never happened before; my eventual solution was to uninstall Zone Alarm and replace it with Microsoft Security Essentials. I frankly wonder in retrospect whether that would have solved my problem with re-installing my Sprint U301 device as well.

I’ve written these last three posts to chronicle these solutions to anyone else who might be having these same problems (and, as I noted two days ago, to apologize to HP and Microsoft for putting the original blame on them for my multitude of BSODs). We’ll now move on to some other topics for a while.  ..bruce..

No problem: I got on the ‘net via the hotel long enough to download the latest and greatest SSV package (version 2.50.0094) from the Sprint support site, installed it, and…could not get my U301 to initialize and connect. The device, when plugged in, appeared to install itself with the requisite drivers, but when I launched SSV to connect to Sprint, SSV would see the device, try to initialize and connect, but never succeed. I did all the usual things (uninstall SSV, uninstall the 301 while deleting the drivers, do a clean reinstall of everything, etc.), but nothing worked.

As it turned out, Sprint had a repair center just four blocks where I was staying. Since I was paying the small monthly fee for equipment protection, I just dropped the U301 off, giving an explanation of my problems. Next day, I get a call: your device works just fine. I swing by the Sprint store, pick up the U301, and later in my hotel room try another clean installation. No luck.

Now, I had purchased the U301 in the spring of 2010, while doing extended work at a customer site back East; it had installed and worked just fine out of the box — same laptop, same OS (less whatever Win7 updates had come out), same system utilities. But I noticed that the SSV software I downloaded was dated 1/13/2011, so it was definitely not the same version I had originally installed.

So, on a hunch, I started searching the ‘net for older versions of the SSV software installation package. I found one: version 2.40xx (vs. 2.50xx on the Sprint site). I removed the 2.50 SSV software and the U301 (with its driver), installed the 2.40 SSV software, and plugged the U301 into my laptop.

Everything installed and ran just fine. It continued to run just fine when the 2.40 software upgraded itself to the 2.50 software.

Now, in light of my simultaneous problems with my Gateway box and the subsequent solution I found, I suspect there might have been another solution. But I’ll talk about that in my next post.  ..bruce..

Second, I have chronicled here my problems with two HP systems — a desktop and a laptop — that I each purchased new, with Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) pre-installed (and in each case upgraded to Win7Pro).  With both systems, I have had chronic problems with blue screens of death (BSODs), particularly when using a wireless connection, though sometimes even when being used with a wired connection. As I wrote last June, what was most telling was my acquisition of a third Win7HP system (also upgraded to Win7Pro 64-bit), a Gateway desktop system. Unlike the two HP systems, where I had lots of BSODs (sometimes a few dozen in a single day), I had never had a BSOD on the Gateway system. The HP BSOD problems would come and go in waves, but they have nevertheless persisted on the two HP systems. I did do a ‘factory restore’ on the laptop at Christmas (as I mentioned I might last June), but that didn’t cure the BSOD problem. As a result, I have been seriously considering buying a new (non-HP) laptop, and ultimately replacing my HP desktop as well. In the meantime, the Gateway kept chugging along flawlessly.

Until a few weeks ago. You see, I took the Gateway system with me out of town on a business trip because I needed to be able to use certain files and applications that were stored on it. The client site didn’t have a wired LAN connection for me, but they did have a wireless access point I could use. So I went out and purchased a wireless USB adapter for the Gateway, got it working after a bit (that’s another story), and then promptly got my first-ever BSOD on the Gateway. And then another. And then another. Like my prior BSODs on the HP systems, I’d get BSODs without even being logged into an account. In the meantime, back at my hotel, I was getting multiple BSODs on my HP laptop whether I was connected wired or wirelessly. I had to switch to my Sprint 3G/4G wireless dongle (yet another story) to avoid those problems.

This forced me to look around a bit more on the net for those with similar problems. I found them: several forums where people described the same symptoms. What was the common theme? Having Zone Alarm Security Suite installed, which I have used for years, and which I had installed on all three machines.

Facepalm.

So I removed Zone Alarm from all three system, replacing it with Microsoft Security Essentials. In the ten (10) days since doing that, I haven’t had a single BSOD on any system, even though I was averaging a bit more than 1 BSOD/day on my laptop alone (47 from January 3rd to February 4th).

I leave you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions.  ..bruce..

Since last November, I have bought three new, out-of-the-box systems preinstalled with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit  (and upgraded to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit at the end of May):

• an HP Pavilion e9237c desktop (quad-core 64-bit  processor, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB hard drive) [purchased early November 2009]
• an HP Pavilion dv7 laptop (dual-core 64-bit processor, 6 GB RAM, 600 GB hard drive) [purchased early March 2010]
• a Gateway SX2802 desktop (quad-core 64-bit processor, 4 GB RAM, 750 GB hard drive) [purchased mid-April 2010]

As I’ve written previously here, I’ve had on-going problems with ‘blue screes of death’ (BSODs) with the HP desktop system, which may or may not be tied to the graphics system. The c:\windows\minidump folder only keeps the last 50 BSOD dumps; a quick review shows that I’ve had 50 BSODs since January 20th of this year. However, given the fact that I was on the road for most of the period from late March through early July, and so not using my desktop very much, that number may be artificially low. For example, I have been home continuously since July 6th; in that time, I have had eleven (11) BSODs.

What I haven’t written about here are the extreme BSOD problems I’ve been having with the HP laptop since buying it earlier this year (early March). I have had literally hundreds of BSODs in that time and would have had more if I had not discovered at least one major factor: a wireless connection. If I have the wireless adapter enabled, not only do I get frequent BSODs while trying to work, I will get BSODs when the computer simply has the login screen up.

Case in point: ten days ago, on July 11th, I had my laptop powered up and the wireless adapter enabled.  My laptop then experienced twenty-seven (27) BSODs from 8:27 am to 2:54 pm, almost all of which happened without me being at the computer or even being logged in (from the windows\minidump directory):

[date]               [time]         [file size]  [file name]

07/11/2010 08:27 AM 296,376 071110-20638-01.dmp

07/11/2010 08:33 AM 296,376 071110-18408-01.dmp

07/11/2010 08:54 AM 296,376 071110-17877-01.dmp

07/11/2010 09:00 AM 296,376 071110-17908-01.dmp

07/11/2010 09:09 AM 296,376 071110-17737-01.dmp

07/11/2010 09:19 AM 296,376 071110-16832-01.dmp

07/11/2010 09:21 AM 296,376 071110-17066-01.dmp

07/11/2010 09:42 AM 296,376 071110-18501-01.dmp

07/11/2010 09:51 AM 296,376 071110-16317-01.dmp

07/11/2010 09:54 AM 296,376 071110-16208-01.dmp

07/11/2010 10:09 AM 296,376 071110-16848-01.dmp

07/11/2010 10:12 AM 296,376 071110-16489-01.dmp

07/11/2010 10:21 AM 296,376 071110-16333-01.dmp

07/11/2010 10:24 AM 296,376 071110-17144-01.dmp

07/11/2010 10:30 AM 296,376 071110-16692-01.dmp

07/11/2010 10:36 AM 296,376 071110-17019-01.dmp

07/11/2010 10:45 AM 296,376 071110-16551-01.dmp

07/11/2010 10:54 AM 296,376 071110-16442-01.dmp

07/11/2010 11:00 AM 296,376 071110-16863-02.dmp

07/11/2010 11:24 AM 296,376 071110-17035-02.dmp

07/11/2010 12:42 PM 296,376 071110-17004-01.dmp

07/11/2010 12:45 PM 296,376 071110-18408-02.dmp

07/11/2010 12:58 PM 296,376 071110-17565-01.dmp

07/11/2010 01:00 PM 296,376 071110-17877-02.dmp

07/11/2010 01:09 PM 296,376 071110-17596-01.dmp

07/11/2010 02:48 PM 296,376 071110-18002-01.dmp

07/11/2010 02:54 PM 296,376 071110-16957-01.dmp

[UPDATE] I ran the WhoCrashed app on the latest 50 crashes on my laptop; it reported that it could only analyze 40 out of the 50. But those forty were, as far as I could tell, identical except for the ‘Bugcheck Code’ line; for example:

On Sun 7/11/2010 3:21:44 PM your computer crashed
This was likely caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe
Bugcheck code: 0x7F (0×8, 0×80050033, 0x6F8, 0xFFFFF80003299E58)
Error: UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP
Dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump71110-17066-01.dmp
file path: C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
The crash took place in a standard Microsoft module. Your system configuration may be incorrect, possibly the culprit is in another driver on your system which cannot be identified at this time.

[END UPDATE]

I do experience occasional BSODs on the laptop when I have the wireless adapter turned off and the laptop hooked up via an ethernet cable to a network, but they are much less frequent. But here’s the really interesting part. Because of my heavy travels, I bought a Sprint ‘net dongle (model U301) and the accompanying Sprint data service plan. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve had a single BSOD when connected to the Sprint network via the Sprint dongle.

In all this, my presumption has been that the problem has been with Microsoft, and it may still be. But back in mid-April, while home for a few days, I bought the Gateway desktop system because I needed a separate system that I could pull off the network to do some significant hard disk decryption and encryption (typically running 5-6 days straight each time). So the system has been powered up and running since mid-April, and has had during that time two 6-day periods of round-the-clock CPU- and I/O-intensive processing. (It is, in fact, the system I am using to write this post.)

Total number of BSODs on the Gateway system since I bought it three months ago: zero (0). Nada. None whatsoever. The c:\windows\minidump folder is empty.

The Gateway system has at least two key differences from the HP systems. First, it has no wireless adapter; the HP desktop has an Atheros 802.11 a/b/g/n Dualband wireless module, while the HP laptop has an Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200 AGN. Second, the Gateway uses an Intel G45/G43 integrated graphics chipset, while the HP desktop uses an ATI Radeon HD 4650 and the HP laptop uses an NVIDIA GeForce G105M.

The HP desktop is stable “enough” that I have no plans of replacing or returning it at the moment. As for the HP laptop, I am considering doing a clean factory restore  (and, if that fails to work, taking it back in; it’s under extended warranty), but it’s going to be a pain, particularly given all the software (including the Win7Pro upgrade) that I have installed on it.

Note, by the way, that I’ve seen no difference in the BSOD rate on either HP system since upgrading each to Windows 7 Professional at the end of May. Note also that ‘Automatically download and install Windows updates’ is enabled for all three systems, so they are all in sync with the latest Windows upgrades and with each other.

Anyone else had similar problems with newer HP systems running Windows 7?  ..bruce..

Most of the electronics that Dad dealt with were old-school: vacuum tubes, custom circuit boards, large and discrete components, and so on. He said that whenever a piece of electronic equipment started acting up, his first course of action — if a quick inspection didn’t reveal a core problem — was to sharply hit the equipment on the top or side. As he explained it, heat and motion tended to loosen connections; a sharp rap would often re-seat those components.

I thought of that tonight when I got a text message from my wife that our dual-band 802.11n router suddenly stopped recognizing her laptop. When I called her, she said that one band wouldn’t accept the household password while the other band (on entering the password) would hang and eventually time out. After talking with her for a minute (we’re about 1,000 miles apart right now), I told her to go power down the router, wait about 30 seconds, power it back up, wait a minute, and then try again.

It worked.

I find it interesting that even as the physical hardware has become smaller, cheaper, more integrated and more reliable, it is our software — the virtual and digital connections — that tend to “come loose” over time. When a piece of digital equipment starts acting funny, how often is our first act — if a first inspection doesn’t reveal a core problem — simply to reboot or power-cycle the equipment? And how often does that, indeed, end up fixing the problem? And it’s not just with home equipment and home systems; I’ve seen the same approach applied to mis-functioning “high-availability” systems in large corporate environments.

This says something, I think, about the fundamental complexity (usually high) and quality (often lower than it should be) of the software, systems, and protocols on which we depend, both personally and professionally. We adapt as individuals and organizations to these systems, rather than having the systems adapt to us. And we all poke along together.  ..bruce..

As noted below, last fall I bought an HP Pavillion desktop (quad-core 64-bit  processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB hd) running Windows 7 (Home Premium 64-bit). It’s got an ATI Radeon 4650 with a chunk of dedicated RAM (512 MB, I think) and a 27″ HD display (1920 x 1080). It all worked more or less fine until a few months ago, when I suddenly started getting random Blue Screens of Death (BSODs), usually while playing a game or watching  a video for a while. Note that some of the games involved weren’t terribly graphic intensive (such as Civ4). Likewise, I had it happen while viewing a YouTube video embedded in a blog. Also note that I had no problems with the exact same games and video applications prior to that point.

As mentioned, I thought that the video card or something else might have gone flaky on me. I do have  a 3-year service warranty on the system, but didn’t want to drag my desktop in to where I bought it. I’ve been swamped for the last month, so I’ve largely ignored the problem.

However, it came up today while I was installing software for a new printer. There was an animated disk icon rotating on the screen, and — kablooey! BSOD! This time I went digging on Google, and I wasn’t happy with what I found. Poking around on several different forums, I found folks describing a variety of problems with ATI Radeon video cards and Windows 7 updates, including in Microsoft forums.

In particularly, I found a couple of posts describing pretty much the same situation I face, namely that things worked well for a while, but random BSODs associated with game and other video-related applications started up after a Windows 7 update sometime a few months ago.

Thank you, Microsoft. I was strongly considering converting over to all Apple hardware and software (with XP dual boot), but was seduced both by the low prices of Wintel hardware and the improvements of Windows 7 over Vista. Between this and my earlier problem, I’m starting to regret it.  ..bruce..

I was in the process of copying some files from elsewhere on my internal LAN onto my desktop’s internal drive — I believe I had two sets of copying going on, one from another laptop, another from a network hard drive. I was also downloading a new version of a particular software program that was already installed. The instructions for that program suggested uninstalling the previous version before installing the new one, so I started doing that as well. (Hey — Win7 is supposed to be a multi-tasking OS, right?)

The de-installation threw up an alert box stating that such-and-such a file could not be deleted due to permission issues. I clicked the ‘OK’ button (my only choice) and waited for the de-installation to complete or terminate.  It did neither, but pretty much hung without making any progress on its glowing green progress bar. I finally grew tired of waiting, brought up Task Manager, and killed the de-installation.

At that point, my desktop redrew itself, except that now almost all of the icons were missing. Uh-oh.

I keep most of my work in folders (not shortcuts, actual folders) on my desktop. Likewise, I tend to park files on the desktop until I decide where to to file them. l I immediately looked at the contents of “C:\Users\<username>\Desktop” and saw that it was empty. Completely empty.

I used a couple of different file recovery packages in an attempt to recover what had vanished. No luck. They found no deleted folders or files within the Desktop folder, and my efforts at doing more extensive scans ran for a few days straight — while still being less than 50% done — before I gave up. (Since getting the desktop, I had used it to collect vast file sets, move them onto external hard drives, then delete those sets. There were likely at least a few million deleted files with traces all over the 1 TB hard drive.)

Before you wag your fingers at me, I did have an external 1.5 TB hard drive to which I was running weekly backups. However, I had just a week or so before the glitch (and a few days after the last backup) moved my desktop system from the main floor to my office downstairs and had not re-attached that external hard drive. This means, of course, that I was able to recover the deleted folders, but the versions were about 10 days old. I didn’t lose a lot, but then, I’m not entirely sure what all I did lose.

Yesterday, I discovered that the same glitch had apparently emptied out the  “MyMusic” folder, wiping out my iTunes library. I restored much of that from my laptop (which had an older version of my iTunes library), but lost everything that I had purchased from the iTunes store and downloaded onto my desktop system.

I’m still not sure what happened. I did a fair amount of searching on the web for similar problems and found that other people had had the same thing happen to them. One posting suggested that my user profile may have been corrupted, but my efforts to fix things that way didn’t help.

I bought a second external hard drive for backups and plan to run them more frequently. I also rearranged things so that I no longer have actual folders within Desktop but only shortcuts to folders elsewhere.

Just a word to the wise.  ..bruce..

This naturally intrigued me, since for the last 15 years, I have been writing, consulting, lecturing, and testifying about troubled and failed IT projects. While there are indeed tremendous financial losses due to late and failed IT projects, the figures Sessions gives seem much too large to me, and so I decided to do this critique of his analysis.

Sessions is good enough to provide the basis of his estimates and calculations, including footnotes. But that’s where some of the problems start. For example,  on page 3, Sessions cites (his footnote ’02′) to the US Budget, Fiscal Year 2009, Analytical Perspective (PDF), p. 169, for information on “at-risk” or failed IT projects, specifically:

• “According to the 2009 U.S. Budget [02], the failure rate is increasing at the rate of around 15% per year. If this trend continues, within another five years or so a total IT meltdown may be unavoidable.” (p. 3)
• “According to the 2009 U.S. Budget [02], 66% of all Federal IT dollars are invested in projects that are ‘at risk’. I assume this number is representative of the rest of the world.” (p. 3, in “Calculating the Cost of IT Failure” box)
• A large number of these ['at risk' projects] will eventually fail. I assume the failure of an ‘at risk’ project is between 50% and 80%. For this analysis, I’ll use the average: 65%.”

These three statements run into immediate problems. First, and relatively minor, Sessions gets his page number wrong: he’s citing “page 169″ of the Analytical Perspective document, but there is no discussion whatsoever on page 169 of that document about IT projects. However, page 157 of that document (which happens to be page 169 of the PDF document) does start a section titled “INTEGRATING SERVICES WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY”, so I presume that Sessions made the simple mistake of using the PDF page count rather than the document’s actual page numbering.

Even so, serious problems remain with Sessions’ citations and analysis.

Page 157 of the Analytical Perspective document does not say what Sessions claimed in the two comments above. I have not been able to figure out where Sessions gets his figure for “the failure rate increasing around 15% per year” from the cited US Budget Analytical Perspective document, much less his conclusion that “if this trend continues, within another five years or so a total IT meltdown may be unavoidable.” As far as I can tell, the Analytical Perspective document does not talk about failed IT projects at all, much less the increase in failure rates.

Furthermore, the phrase “the failure rate increasing around 15% per year” is itself ambiguous and may not be that significant. To start with an arbitrary number, assume that 100 projects “fail” in a given year. If “the failure rate [is] increasing around 15% per year”, then that means that 115 projects would fail the next year, and 132 projects would fail the year after that. But unless we know both the actual number of failed IT projects and the total number of IT projects in that same year, Sessions’ figure tells us nothing. If there’s only 150 IT projects total, then the 15% failure rate increase becomes very significant; if there’s 1000 IT projects total, then we’re many years away from Sessions’ threatened “meltdown”.

Sessions also ignores or confuses the failure rate for new projects vs. the systems already deployed. In other words, the failure rate for new systems development says very little about the continued functionality of existing, deployed systems now in use. While there are occasions (most notably Y2k, now a decade behind us) where existing IT systems just won’t function or function properly if they aren’t fixed or replaced, by and large both governments and private concerns have gotten along remarkably well for years or even decades with antiquated systems

As for Sessions’ second statement, there is a table on page 158 that may represent the basis for it:

As can be seen in the FY 2009 column, 66% (535 out of 810) of the FY 2009 “Major IT Investments” are projects that are “Not Well Planned and Managed”. Note that this table does not (as Sessions infers) indicate Federal dollars but rather actual projects; that is, in FY 2009, there are 810 projects listed as “Major IT investments”, of which 535 are designated as “Not Well Planned and Managed”. The previous page appears to indicate that these projects represent $27 billion, which is roughly 38% of the proposed Federal IT budget — not a great figure, but still almost half of the 66% that Sessions claims.

What’s more, supplementary data (PDF) for the FY 2009 Analytical Perspective makes it clear that the US Government’s designation of such projects — which puts them on a “Management Watch List” (WML) — has reduced the risk of such projects during each fiscal year:

Note that in FY 2007 and 2008, the number of IT projects designated as “Not Well Planned and Managed” shrunk significantly during the year (from Q1 to Q4) without a proportional shrinkage of the overall number of major IT projects. In other word, it appears that the government’s efforts to remove such projects from the “Not Well Planned and Managed” category is relatively successful. And the actual US IT budget dollars at risk at the end of each of those fiscal years ($4.2 billion for FY 07, $8.6 billion for FY 08)  is a much smaller percentage (6.5% and 13%, respectively) of the Federal IT budget for each of those years ($64.2 billion for FY 07 (XLS), $66.4 billion for FY 08 (XLS)).

Sessions then states that “I assume this number [66% of all Federal IT dollars being at risk] is representative of the rest of the world.” There are numerous problems with this assumption, starting with the fact that the 66% figure is wrong; in fact, the actual “at risk” (his term, not the US Government’s) percentage of the IT budget at the end of FY 07 and FY 08 were, as noted above, 6.5% and 13%, respectively.

Sessions’ error here is significant, since he goes on in several places (cf. page 4) to cite his use of the % of the total IT budget as being significant, when he’s not talking about the total IT budget at all.

Furthermore, it is unclear whether his phrase “the rest of the world” means all other national governments, or all other entities doing IT project development. It seems to be the latter, though it’s hard to tell from his statements. On the other hand, I have spent years consulting with corporations on troubled projects, and I can tell you that they do not have 66% of their IT budgets devoted to “at risk” projects. In fact, the majority of corporate IT budgets are devoted to maintenance of existing systems, not new and risky projects (cf. here, here, here, and here, as simple examples).

As noted, Sessions then assumes that the failure rate for “at risk” IT projects is 65%, which means that (as he says) “I am calculating that 43% (.65 x .66) of the total IT budget” is devoted to failed projects. At this point, his figures become nonsensical, as they are derived both from misreadings and lack of complete information about the Federal IT budget and projects. To wit:

• The 535 “not well planned and managed” IT projects in the US FY 09 budget only represent 38% of the total IT budget, not 66% as Sessions mistakenly states.
• In the two previous years (FY 07 and FY 08), the number of IT projects labeled as “not well planned and managed” dropped during the course of each year (see the 2nd table above). In FY 07, it dropped from 263 projects in Q1 to just 84 in Q4, which means that 69% were moved off of the “not well planned and managed” list during the year. Likewise, in FY 08, it dropped from 346 projects in Q1 to 134 projects in Q4, a drop of 61%. This directly contradicts Sessions’ assumption of a 65% failure rate for projects in the “not well planned and managed” category.
• The FY ’09 Analytical Perspective says nothing about actual failed projects, as far as I can tell.

Sessions then goes on to make further out-of-his-hat assumptions regarding “direct and indirect costs”. He cites an example of the IRS (an agency long troubled by IT woes) and notes a lost opportunity based on fraudulent tax returns due to the system not being operational. He projects a loss over two years ($1.788 billion), compares it to the cost of the failed modernization ($185 million over a ten-year period), and calculates an indirect costs ratio of 9.6 to 1. He then decides — with no other documentation or analysis whatsoever — that the universal ratio of indirect to direct costs for a failed IT project ranges from 5:1 to 10:1, and uses the “average” of 7.5:1.

There are so many problems here that I scarce know where to start. For starters, the term “average” assumes an even distribution of ratios from 5:1 to 10:1 and does not recognize any ratios lower than 5:1. I’ve seen many failed projects that had much lower ratios of “indirect” to “direct” costs, since the firm simply continued to operate using the existing systems, and the “lost opportunity” for not having the new system in place was relatively small.

More importantly, the IRS gets to collect taxes from the entire US: $2.5 trillion in tax collections each year. Using the IRS as a baseline makes little sense for most other government agencies, and even less sense for most corporations and non-government organizations (NGOs), because most IT systems in most organizations (government or private) do not have the ability to generate such magnitudes of revenue, period.

Indeed, there is a long-standing controversy within IT management circles as to whether a new computer system can be relied upon to provide any significant return on investment (ROI), or whether it exists merely to “keep up with the competition”.

Sessions concludes his section on calculations thusly (p. 5, emphasis his):

Of course, these calculations are estimates. I recommend you don’t get overly focused on the exact amounts. I could be off by ten or twenty percent in either directions. The real point is not the exact numbers, but the magnitude of the numbers and the fact that the numbers are getting worse.

Unfortunately, Sessions is fundamentally wrong in his numerical analysis, and his numbers are off by far more than “ten or twenty percent”. For the Federal Government alone, they are off by almost  a full order of magnitude (10x), due to his critical errors both on the percentage of the Federal IT ’09 budget “at risk” (it’s 38%, not 66%) and the number of “at risk” projects that fail (he says 65%; the US government numbers for FY 07 and 08 show that only 35% of the projects — representing just 6.5% to 13% percent of the Federal IT budget — were still “at risk” at the end of each fiscal year, and it gives no figures that I can find for actual failed IT projects).

Furthermore, his projection of the (erroneous) 66%-of-IT-budget-at-risk figure on the rest of the world is just wrong, especially in corporations and business (which spend vastly more on IT than the US government). In those organizations, maintenance costs dominates, and the percentage of the IT budget devoted to new projects tends to be small (20% or less), with an even smaller fraction of that representing “at risk” projects.

I may comment more on Sessions’ paper, but my conclusion here is that his estimate of $500 billion/month in lost direct and indirect costs due to IT systems failure just does not hold up, in my opinion.  ..bruce..

Each technology is on its own product lifecycle, which may or may not match with your organization’s business and development lifecycles. In particular, there are certain cycle mismatch patterns that commonly occur in organizations looking to adopt new technologies. I’ve labeled four such mismatch patterns: firefly, underdone, conveyer belt, and landfill. Each is worth examining.

Go read the whole thing.  ..bruce..