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Arlington National Cemetery's Many IT Flaws
imac.usr writes "A story in today's Washington Post calls to light the utter failure of the nation's most sacred final resting place to modernize its pen-and-paper record system. According to the story, the cemetery's administrators have spent $5 million without managing to accomplish the seemingly simple task of creating a database record of the site's graves. As Virginia senator Mark Warner points out, 'We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled.'"
I mean, really. You can setup a redundant/distributed from bare-metal to running in about 6 hours (including full disk scans). Add a cron job to do a dump every night and even just write that to DVD. Creating a database shouldn't be that big a deal. Even designing a web based front-end to search the records and input new ones wouldn't take more than a couple weeks to hash out and implement. Will it be the flashiest thing, no, but it will work and be better than pen-paper. Now, importing all those paper records, that will be the hard part....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
And there are already systems available that can manage cemeteries so why not purchase one?
Arlington has 300,000 gravesites on 624 acres.
"In addition to in-ground burial, Arlington National Cemetery also has one of the larger columbariums for cremated remains in the country. Four courts are currently in use, each with 5,000 niches. When construction is complete, there will be nine courts with a total of 50,000 niches; capacity for 100,000 remains." Arlington National Cemetery
Does your off-the-shelf package scale to to a cemetery of that size?
Arlington has extraordinary historical significance. The data base needs to be more than a bare list of names and dates.
Yep, private industry has never wasted a cent. Their track record is spot on.
http://it-project-failures.blogspot.com/