We would now like you to work through a pair of activities to reflect on the two case studies you have just seen, and to relate them to other examples of success and failure in IT systems that you know from elsewhere.
30 minutes
Apart from one being public sector and one being private sector, what do you think are the three main differences between these two case studies? Make notes (around half a page in each case) on what you think made the first system a success and the second one a failure.
In our view (and throughout these answers we recognise that your view may be different and just as valid), the three main differences between the case studies are as follows:
Mitchells & Butlers’ IT overhaul feels like a successful system. It is designed to draw upon existing systems, but to work with modern technology − there is much use of virtualisation and the cloud. It is standardised across different sites, although with appropriate local changes if necessary. A clear plan was identified and followed, and benchmarking with comparable organisations used to get a feel for the success of the plan. It has to be said that most of the discussion is from the central management perspective, and that other stakeholders within the organisation might see the success or otherwise somewhat differently.
By contrast, the BBC Digital Media Initiative feels like a failing system. It is described very negatively throughout the report. It was over-ambitious in terms of its scale, significantly behind schedule and ended up being largely incomplete. A few aspects of it were completed (notably the ‘Fabric archive database’) but most of the project remained incomplete, which as it was conceived as an integrated whole, meant that it was largely unusable. At the time of the report given here, reasons for the failure were still to be investigated.
1 hour
We hope you enjoyed finding these case studies. There are many rich case studies available online, although it can sometimes be challenging to separate genuine descriptions of an IT success story from what is basically a marketing piece by a vendor or consultancy. Failures are easier to spot in this regard!
OpenLearn - Successful IT systems Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.