HINC3 – The history of Nordic Computing

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in the third Nordic conference on the history of computing; The first conference of this kind was held in Norway, Trondheim in 2003. It was stated that the purpose of the conference is to re-examine the past:

The Nordic computing started with hardware such as BARK, BESK, and DASK. Why have we come into the position we are now? Could we have done better? What, in the past, did we good and which decisions were less good? What can we learn from the past? How should we continue in the future?
Consequently, the aim of this conference on Nordic Computing History is to re-examine our past and to extract experience and knowledge which we may use in order to make wiser decisions about future endeavours in information technology in the Nordic countries.

The fascinating thing about the conference is the possibility to meet the 'grand old men' of Nordic computing – Christian Gram, Janis Bubenko, Bjørn Nagell, Ivar Jacobsson, Arne Sølvberg , Harold Lawson, to mention a few, but definitely also the opportunity to review what the heck has happened to Data processing, or ICT as it is called these days, from the very early days and to discuss the role of the Nordics – companies, public sector, science, education – in this process.

The conference was opened by one of the key technology gurus from IBM's center for Business Value, Jim Cortada. He is particularly well know from his many books and for his recent work on 'disruptive technologies' . His opening keynote speech was indeed an excellent walk-through of the break points in the evolution of computer industry leading up to real disruptive nature of the internet (the internet-of-things to come) and how he introduced the 'digital hand' as a modern response to Adam Smith's invisible hand. The global nature of the phenomenon and how this will impact the whole range of industries and everyday is a fascinating thought.

At this link you will be able to look at the presentations as soon as the presenters have consented to sharing their thoughts: http://dsv.su.se/en/hinc3/papers/

During the cause of the next 3 days an impressive number of interesting presentations were given by the participating scholars, historians and computer specialists – some very interesting stories about particular applications, such as Norwegian Land Register, Battlefield operations in Sweden, Controlling electricity flows in Sweden (absolutely relevant given to days' discussion about intelligent networks), history of Danish Registers, Swedish medicine prescriptions, reliable Real-Time systems – all of which clearly demonstrate the Nordic Countries' role as first movers in several areas.

The entertainment during night time included a Balalajka band - Kazbek Balalajka – including Thomas Ohlin, who was said to have started this band in the later 40'ies!

On the following day I had the pleasure to present my speech on 'Early History of Computing in Denmark' based on the research in connection with my plan to document IBM Denmark's 60 years of history. This presentation covers the period before IBM was established – from the first customers of Hollerith equipment (Statistical department, here a picture from 1917), describing the period under the agent Max Bodenhoff, who was a marvellous salesman that managed to establish a solid customer base and a service bureau, that survived the war and became the basis for a real IBM subsidiary. In the same group of presentations Lars Heide from CBS presented the interesting story about the fathers of Eniac and what became of their plan to become commercial. Petri Paju from Finland presented the history and role of IBM manufacturing in the Nordic countries, and Sverrir Olafsson gave a very positive account of the years when IBM World Trade operated a Branch Office in Iceland – a very unique construction, which I remembered well – particularly as IBM Denmark and the Nordic Education Center of course were anchor points for the Icelandic operations. They are certain to get a nice place in my history of IBM!

Tor Olav Steine from Norway gave a brilliant presentation on the rise, fall and bankrupcy of Norsk Data – amazing how fast this company wnet under during the last 80'es – probably one of the first victims of the personal computers, even before the Internet was really a threat.

During a panel discussion in plenum I participated together with Ingeborg Sølvberg, Nina Wormbs , and Harlold 'Bud' Lawson discussing Tomas Ohlin's questions on 'What is unique about Computing in the Nordic Countries?' While Bud Lawson had a relatively pessimistic outlook for the future, almost foreseeing the collapse of the internet as a necessity to re-start Nordic creativity, and Ingeborg Sølvbergs cry for more women in the computing science faculties, I am really neither pessimistic for the future, nor am I a believer in a university/research led innovative future -at least not as the only driving force. Looking back over the last 20-30 years it is my clear position that it cannot be a coincidence that the Nordic countries are considered world leaders in deployment of computing technology and at the same time considered the top countries in realization of what we call the welfare state. The point is, that if historians should focus, I would suggest to try to document the link between these 2 roads of development and see how the take-up in society and in government of new technology has helped give us another sort of competitive advantage that 'just' trade balance considerations.

We had an interesting presentation of a massive research of real end-users that a group of nordic, primarily Swedish and Finnish historians has undertaken to document how users of IT (DP) has described what they had experienced. This is a massive bunch of interviews, that now is being put only for open research.

The conference dinner was accompanied by a Swedish Students' band – Kårsdraget – absolutely crazy and again a very traditional band, now including nice looking female students, something the older part of the audience applauded very much as this was news compared to the 50'ies.

Wednesday morning was opened by Ivar Jacobson among other innovative jobs the founder of Rational (later acquired by IBM) – that spoke about software engineering method and theory with a natural weight on business modelling.

The Finnish participants led by Petri Paju later demonstrated how new text mining and mapping solutions developed in Turku had helped to produce the first interesting, graphical representations on these end user's choice of topics and their relationships to other persons interviewed in the vast material.

Also Inara Opmane, professor from Riga Mathematics and Computing Research Centre, gave a very interesting account on IT before and after the fall of the iron curtain, where the center in Riga was one of the 4 most important computer research centers in Soviet Union. As I presented IBM Multimedia early in the 90'ies at the very University, it was very nice to see how far they have come by now – and interesting that they still have some of the old Russian computers in their museum!

At the closing of the conference Christian Gram presented the Danish delegation's ideas on how a HINC4 could be organised; as CBS and Lars Heide is organizing a Technology History Conference in 2012 where computer history might have a track, we suggest that the HINC4 is postponed to 2014, and possibly with a focus on Nordic Computing History in a global perspective but with a focus on societal applications – Health, Welfare, Education, eGovernment.

Why do Public IT-Projects fail?

On May 21. the Danish Technology Council is inviting to a workshop under this heading. They have invited several specialists to present points-of-view on various aspects, and I am invited to comment on the need for standardization and architecture.

As this is central to the eGovernment course I am preparing for the Masters' education at the Danish IT University from this autumn, I welcome the initiative and the opportunity to discuss with some of the victims as well as meeting the people, that are classified either as 'rascals' or at least passive viewers to the mess, that admittedly seem to have happened a number of times.

This is not the first time the Danish Technology Council has focused on the topic; in 2002 a special group was created headed by Erik Bonnerup, a renowned public sector manager with a past track record of CEO also for KMD, the large Danish ICT-company focusing on municipal and regional computing.

The report from this group to a large extent has since been acknowledged as the best of it's kind, but unfortunately 8 years after the recommendations have not seen to have influenced the success rate much; The Govt. Audit Authority recently came to about the same conclusion as the Bonnerup committee, that hardly any public IT project meets it's objective nor sticks to the original project plan nor budget. The auditors point to the point that unforeseen complexities account for the majority of reasons for delays and budget overrun.

Having spent 39.5 years with one of the major suppliers of ICT technology to the Public sector, I recall numerous situations from way back – the Illness Insurance Project in 1972-73, the new Financial Management system for regional and local Govternment in late 70'is, the financial management system for all higher education centers and schools in the 80'is over the so-called Amanda project for the unemployment services in the 90'is, the Procurement Portal supposed to save billions for the public sector purchase agencies, to the original VIRK-project – a portal for all enterprises and their interface to the public - and to todays major flops – some well-known like the current problems with the digitization of the Property Registration System/cadastral System in Denmark – and some very well hidden but real disaster projects like the failure to deliver an emergency management system covering police, rescue services, hospitals, fire brigade and civil defense.

One thing they all seem to have in common is that all projects had a distinct borderline between the IT-project and the organizations, institutions, users and 'customers' = citizens/companies/other Govt. Institutions. Almost in all cases the vast majority of effort in the preparation phase has been allocated to a detailed specification of the functionality of the IT system, often to a degree where 80 % of very detailed requirements are specified as 'mandatory', and only in recent cases the requirements have also covered 'non functional' requirements – such as scalability, response time, security.

At the same time Denmark has been more and more focused on a very strict interpretation of the EU tendering regulations, and this leads to a situation, where innovation during project delivery is forbidden, where the public sector's project managers stick to the contract and not to possible changing realities, new technological development, even new happenings in the market place and environment.

Some of the recent thinking points to the lack of centrally defined mandatory strategic guidelines and a centrally defined IT Architecture for the public sector. The guidelines issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology were issued 3-4 years ago, but they are not mandatory, and to some of the municipal managers they may seem too academic and too far from day-to-day operational need.

Although I do agree that Enterprise Architecture definitely is part of the solution – in as much as the idea of EA is to couple management and ICT capacities according to the strategic business processes – I fear that a request for a centrally defined all-encompassing EA for the entire public sector will hamper innovation even more – and even stress some of the reasons for failure, that in my perspective are much more severe: ICT projects are defined too narrowly, too technically, and hardly never ever try to cover all the aspects of organization theory, social impact and the vast amount of knowledge that we have accumulated from non-IT studies on how technology are able to enable the performance of organizations – and recently even more the behavior of networked agencies and organizations, where the most ambitious ICT projects nowadays are being implemented. I will come back to how I view the possibilities of defining a Danish framework for EA in Government.

The Property registration System (link in Danish) is notorious in several ways: The government notary functions report to the institution called Domstolsstyrelsen, the agency that are controlling the administration and work of all courts in Denmark. The specific Land Registration Notaries are extremely sensitive for buyers and sellers of property, as registration is required to obtain financing, sell mortgages and start building or modifying on the properties sold. It started as a major analysis made by DeLoitte in 2005 with general use cases, project plans, overview of document types, a logical data model, benefits and costs – and a suggestion that the project could be finished end 2007.

To head the project a well known person with ICT background from the IT Task Force was selected – Adam Wolf. A very skilled person but none the less with an ICT background. The project was started based on DeLoittes recommendations.

After some delays the project was delivered by CSC in the autumn 2009. Immediately it created huge problems in the handling of the various document types already somewhere in the process, some of the delays noted were now several months – causing real financial problems for a lot of people. A request has recently be made that the private persons or small companies are reimbursed for their excess costs as a result of the delays. To this the CSC project manager in February responded, that 'The IT project was run according to plan – delivered at the approved time, and has been operating with an uptime of 99,8 since!'.

And today in Berlingske Tidende Adam Wolf states that 'The Property Registration System is an excellent solution that got an unfortunate start'. Adam W points to all the manual processes, that were 'extraordinary' including a 'backlog from the old system' stating that 'It was the (manual) case management system that didn't perform – not the IT system.'

In my opinion this simply underlines my argument that most of the problem is that the modernization project has ONLY been focused on the technical and technological aspects, including coding of the functionalities as stated by the changed legislation. What has NOT been considered has been the process to imbed the technology in the organization, including the handling of interfaces with the suppliers of data and information. Any sociologist will ask questions like how the acceptance, enablement and management of the change project was handled seen from the human and intra-organisational way. The political management behind the reform should have been advised that the change required more skills that ICT project management, and that human process knowledge and management are even more required in situations where processes are changed, where employees get unfamiliar tasks, when demands fluctuate and when traditional bureaucratic controls are used in stead of human motivation, establishment of social networks and encouragement of the new 'super users' as partners and mentors for those in need. This type of failures are common for all the projects, mentioned above – plus some specific blunders in each of them, of course.

So the future solutions are depending on:

1) Framework Enterprise Architecture and mandatory, selectede standards for API's

2) Less strict interpretation of EU tender rules with room for innovation and stepwise improvement of mutual understanding between stakeholders

3. Review of change management team – including sociological and organisational projekt management emphasis

4. General acceptance of performance measurement system including employee take-up of new IT projects

I will be back with more comments concerning the wrecked Emergency Management System – SINE – other points of learning can be obtained from this. ( And – as a sort of competition: May I ask by readers to try to google any relationship between Økonomistyrelsen, Terma, Sine and the Tetra Net. Somebody REALLY has a way of making clean ups!)