I picked up an old note off my desk:
“You are a wise person if you do not make mistakes;
you are clever person if you make a mistake but do not repeat it;
you are a stupid person if you make a mistake and repeat it.”
It is “an ancient proverb” quoted by Effy Oz in “When Professional Standards Are Lax: The CONFIRM Failure and its Lessons”, Communications of the ACM, October 1994, Vol. 37, No. 10.
Professor OZ was a professor of Management Science and Information Systems at Pennsylvania State University.
I have long thrown out most of my copies of the Communications of the ACM (Association of Computer Machinery), but I did find the article online. For a PDF copy, look up “EP23_Confirm”.
CONFIRM was an ambitious project to bring together the registration systems of American Airlines, Budget Rent-A-Car, Hilton Hotels, and Marriott Corporation. A subsidiary of American Airlines proposed it to Marriott in 1987, by 1992 the project was disbanded.
The article details much of the finger-pointing for the failure, but I think it is higher management not understanding what is possible and middle management trying to sugar-coat the problems.
Isn’t ironic that despite the glitches of the Affordable Care Act, the far more complex system is working in less than four years?
