Anatomy of the VA's IT Meltdown

Lucas123 writes "According to a Computerworld story, a relatively simple breakdown in communications led to a day-long systems outage within the VA's medical centers. The ultimate result of the outage: the cancellation of a project to centralize IT systems at more than 150 medical facilities into four regional data processing centers. The shutdown 'left months of work to recover data to update the medical records of thousands of veterans. The procedural failure also exposed a common problem in IT transformation efforts: Fault lines appear when management reporting shifts from local to regional.'"

Comments

Somebody explain why it doesn't work like this

[blhack]

Why didn't the build the second "centralized" system in parallel to the one that already existed? This way, when the new system failed miserably, just flip the switch (or DNS record) back to the old servers and retool the "solution" that you were testing.....

that brings another point to mind...

DIDN'T THEY TEST THE FREAKING THING!?