Northrop Grumman Says 'I'm Sorry' For Virginia IT Outage

Lucas123 writes "After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies' websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns."

Comments

Apt Futurama quote

[dkleinsc]

Hermes: What do we do when we break somebody's window?
Dwight: Pay for it?
Hermes: Heavens, no! We apologize! With nice, cheap words.

Re:$2.6 billion service contract?

[AB3A]

Mod parent way up. I've seen it in other places too.

Often when you ask people in the accounting department, they'll say they don't really know what's going on because IT made the system. When you talk to IT, they'll say they don't know because the system was specified by Accounting. The truth is that some smart guys in each department got together and forged some sort of system together. Then the smart guys went on to bigger and better things, while the peons were left with some special voodoo system.

Now you want to move said voodoo system over to a consulting company. The assumption is that the Accountants know every detail of what the old system did. Well, they don't. But nobody is willing to step forward and say that. So the new consultants come along and gosh, nobody knows what the systems do.

Then people ponder why it "doesn't work." Sigh.

This is how shit happens.