The Risk Factor

I have long argued that the IT community needs to separate IT failures from blunders.

Most organizations do not have enough IT project failures. The reason I say this is that, in my experience, most project cancellations (or escalations for that matter) are not true failures but instead represent blunders. There is a big difference. A project failure is one in which most project decisions and actions were correct at the time, but for some reason the project didn't work out. It is a professional project -- the project risks were assessed, managed, and accepted where required; the assumptions were checked; success criteria were defined; the plan was estimated and funded well; the stakeholders participated; and so on.

Project blunders, which I contend most project overruns and cancellations are, arise from Dilbert-like approaches to project management and implementation. There is little or no risk management, the project plan is a fantasy, stakeholder concerns are given short shrift, and on and on.

Well, in a distressingly familiar story in today's LA Times, yet another IT blunder is described. The lede paragraph reads as follows:

Since launching a $95-million computer system six months ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District has been beset by programming glitches, hardware crashes and mistakes by hurriedly trained clerical staff. The result: tens of thousands of teachers, cafeteria workers, classroom aides and others have been underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all.

Sounds like a blunder to me.

In an article titled, "Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?" in this month's CrossTalk (the Journal of Defense Software Engineering) and in a subsequent interview in Datamation under the title of "Who Killed the Software Engineers", two emeritus computer science professors from New York University argue that universities are so desperate to keep computer science student enrollments up, that they are dumbing down the curriculum to attract prospect students. This dumbing down, professors Robert B.K. Dewar and Edmond Schonberg say, is producing software engineers with a "set of skills insufficient for today’s software industry (in particular for safety and security purposes), and, unfortunately, matches well what the outsourcing industry can offer. We are training easily replaceable professionals."

Dewar says in the interview that, " 'A lot of it is, ‘Let’s make this [computer science and programming] all more fun.’ You know, ‘Math is not fun, let’s reduce math requirements. Algorithms are not fun, let’s get rid of them. Ewww – graphic libraries, they’re fun. Let’s have people mess with libraries. And [forget] all this business about ‘command line’ – we’ll have people use nice visual interfaces where they can point and click and do fancy graphic stuff and have fun.' "

Dewar goes on, " 'Universities tend to be in the raw numbers mode. Oh my God, the number of computer science majors has dropped by a factor of two, how are we going to reverse that?’ ”

Dewar and Schonberg point out in their article that companies like UK-based Praxis (see an article on the company published in IEEE Spectrum) who use formal methods to develop safety-critical systems are having a hard time finding people with the proper mathematical training, even though formal methods are taught in more in the UK than in the US.

I blogged a few months ago about Cambridge University having trouble recruiting computer science students, with part of the reason for the troubles being that the program, in Cambridge's words, "is a rigorous and demanding course." Yesterday's Globe and Mail also had a story about computer science enrollments dropping at many Canadian Universities by 36% to 64%.

The article has caused a stir in the defense community, with Dewar saying that he has received a lot of support for the position in their CrossTalk article.

But is the situation as dire as professors Dewar and Schonberg claim, or a natural issue of supply and demand, or is it over-blown, being one of those, "When I was your age, I had to walk fifty miles to school" arguments, or is it something else?

There was a story in last Sunday's Seattle Times about the fact that nearly 25% of the 637,000 aerospace workers in the US can retire next year, possibly posing a severe skills shortage in the commercial and defense aviation. In addition, the article notes that the demand for "aerospace, electrical, mechanical and computer engineering disciplines is expected to be double what it was 10 years ago."

The story goes on to say that many younger workers view aerospace plants as "old fashion industries."

As I noted a few weeks ago, there is a controversy raging about whether universities and colleges are teaching future IT workers inappropriate skills, and that it is becoming increasingly hard to attract students into science and technology. Given this and the looming retirement situation, is the US poised to lose its aerospace dominance?

Also, with US is pouring more money into advance defense systems than any time since World War II, can these systems even be built, given the high-tech resource scarcity that will hit in the next decade?

Who is likely to dominate the aerospace field in the future? Is it automatically the Pac Rim, given Europe looks in even worse shape than the US, given its demographics and inability to attract high tech students into their universities as well?

And how much does it matter to the US, if at all? And if does matter, what can realistically be done about it?

I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

There is an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) this week on the introduction of the first engineering program at a women's college. It is particularly relevant to some of the discussion (here and here, for example) on the potential future state of US high-tech.

The article says,

"The first women's college to offer an engineering degree, Smith is forging new paths in a field that's eager to swell its ranks in the United States. Women receive only 20 percent of bachelor's degrees in engineering, according to a new report by the National Science Board (NSB). Like a handful of other liberal arts colleges, Smith is producing graduates who've had a different type of engineering education – one that goes beyond technical training to focus on a broader context for finding solutions to humanity's problems; one that emphasizes ethics and communication; one so flexible that about half the students study abroad, which is rare, despite the multinational nature of many engineering jobs."

It also sounds like Smith has gone and hired some very gifted instructors, such as Professor Glen Ellis, who the CSM writes arrived "at his engineering class dressed as a mountain climber. He hooks a rope to the ceiling, projects snow-capped scenery on the wall, and asks a volunteer to join him in a mock ascent." Needless to say, the students pay attention to the lecture and get a broader view of what engineering as a subject means.

Ellis makes the point in a speech in accepting his US Professor of the Year award last November from Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education that,

"It is just not good enough to teach the way that we were taught. We know that doing so in engineering will surely exclude many of the young people we need to attract."

Amen to that.

The CSM article goes on to state that, "Much research in recent years points to the idea that the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and math, known collectively as STEM, is crying out for improvement. ... The NSB report says that 83 percent of professors still use lecture and discussion as their primary methods in undergraduate classes."

The trick is, of course, how to compete for the attention of young minds among all the other possibilities and get them interested in STEM without dumbing it down into becoming a clown college atmosphere. I don't think there are a lot of extroverted, innovative or self-confident STEM professors like Glenn Ellis's out there, or STEM departments that encourage this approach either. Maybe what is needed is a graduate school for STEM professors (and their Deans) to learn how to teach these subjects more interestingly to students who are increasingly skeptical of the value of these fields.

In an Ars Technica story pointed out to me by IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Joshua Romero, there is some data that suggests that the drop in university and college student enrollment in computer science has bottomed off, at least for the moment. Information gathered from the Computing Research Association shows that for the past three years, newly declared CS majors has remained in the vicinity of around 7,500 or so. This is still about half as many as those who declared a CS major in 2000.

Computer science professor Jacob Slonim from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada blames the media instead of computer science professors for some of the decline in enrollment the past few years, at least in Canada. Slonim is quoted in ITWorldCanada as saying, “Every time Nortel lays off employees, it makes major headlines. But when CGI says it’s looking for 2,500 new people, we never hear about it. The fact that I’m forecasting the need for 80,000 new IT people by 2010 hasn’t made headlines either.”

The Washington Post reported last week that the College Board will be dropping the Advanced Placement Computer Science AB course and exam (the curriculum is here) after the 2008-2009 academic year. The College Board says that with only 5,064 students and 1,163 teachers taking part there was not enough interest.

According to the College Board website, "Computer Science AB includes all the topics of Computer Science A, as well as a more formal and a more in-depth study of algorithms, data structures, and data abstraction. For example, binary trees are studied in Computer Science AB but not in Computer Science A. The use of recursive data structures and dynamically allocated structures is fundamental to Computer Science AB."

The Computer Science A course seems unaffected.

The Washington Post ran a story over the weekend about Virginia's pilot program to teach students about safe Internet practices. Beginning this September, students in all grades will be taught about Internet safety. Virginia's program is the first in the nation that is mandated by law.

While I was aware of the program when it got signed into law in 2006, I kind of lost track of its status until the Post article. With two young children in Virginia public schools this fall, I will be interested in what they are taught and how much it sinks in. My older child has an occasional computer class, but she hasn't said anything about the program to me. Nor do I recall seeing any announcements from her school. When I quizzed her about whether her teachers had taught her about safe Internet practices, she didn't seem aware of any instruction being given in relation to the program itself.

This has made me curious about how effective the program will be, since the according to the Post story, "The state initiative calls for including parents. One chapter in a state resource book covers 'What Parents, Grandparents, and Caregivers Need to Know.' " The story does say that in some jurisdictions, there has been a move to get parents involved - I just don't know how widespread it is. It hasn't reached me yet.

I'll let you all know what transpires when the Fall school session starts. I think it is a good idea - the ultimate value, however, will be in its implementation.

Now that the traditional first full week of school has ended in the US, the press is filled with stories of computer-related problems in to getting children to school and into classes.

For example, Albany High School in Albany, New York was opened for school last Tuesday, but then was shut down for the rest of the week because of a software problem with the program used for creating class schedules for its 2900 students. Too many student had wrong or incomplete schedules for classes to be held. Classes are now scheduled to restart this week.

In Chicago, a computer problem was blamed for sending some student records to the wrong schools. As a result, the affected students when they showed up for class were told that they were not enrolled at the school they thought they were supposed to be. Some students subsequently were told to report to a different school or to go home. This did not make their parents very happy when they found out. It took most of last week to straighten out that mess.

A very similar situation happened to students attending schools in Prince Georges County, Maryland. School officials blamed their problems on a new computer system that the school system had bought.

Hudson County schools in Ohio opened for a week, and then finally had to shut down for a day as its bus transportation system had a nervous breakdown. The school system used new software to generate bus routes in order to save money in the wake of higher fuel costs, but the result that at least 10% of students were never picked up on the first day of class, others were picked up early, while others were instead dropped off late. The school district has now reverted back to using last year’s bus routes.

A few years back, my daughter’s school system also “upgraded” its bus routing software, with about the same results. We went through several bus route iterations, including one where the coordinates of her bus stop placed it neatly 100 feet underground.

The Los Angeles Times ran a story last week on the various software school systems are installing to allow parents to see what their children are doing during the school day. For instance, there is a program called MealpayPlus that allows a parent to see what their children are buying for lunch at school. It also can, according to its website, set up an auto-payment plan that allows a parent to add money when their child's account falls below a certain amount.

Then there is Pearson's PowerSchool, that the story says can "keep track of students' test scores and how often they show up for class” which allows parents to go online and see how their children are performing. Parents can also find out what homework is being assigned, and if it is being handed in.

Pearson's website says that its software is being used in over 10,000 schools.

I suppose it will only be a matter of time - if it hasn't already been done - before this school performance information is fused with the information from car tracking systems now available for reporting the driving habits of student drivers to their parents. It won't be long after that, I predict, before some company offers a way to automatically disable your teenager's car if his or her grades aren't up to snuff.

The Times story says that there is a growing debate brewing about whether such parental oversight capability (some critics call it surveillance) helps nip potential school problems early or instead only serves to encourage even more helicopter parenting.