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Strategic Management of Information and Communication Technology The United States Air Force Experience with Y2K (2007) / Chapter Skim
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5 Technology Risk as a Socially Embedded Issue
Pages 111-116

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From page 111...
... . Similarly, the widespread electricity grid failure in August 2003 has been attributed in part to an analyst who fixed a data error for an automated tool assessing the health of the grid, then forgot to reset it to run automatically and left for lunch (U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force)
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From page 112...
... Eventually, these initial erroneous enthusiasms are subdued and put into perspective when traditional paradigms of analysis in the social sciences, engineering, or even the humanities reveal this "unique" thing to be a member of broader social categories with their own determinants and well-known laws of motion. This general trajectory has been true for the Information Revolution as a whole.2 The arc of understanding starts with an unhealthy dose of techno-determinism.
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From page 113...
... Thomas Hughes describes the development of the first large-scale real-time general purpose digital computer (SAGE, the first machine that we would recognize today as being a computer at all) , observing that "system builders in the 1950s were learning that the managerial problems of large-scale projects loomed as large as engineering ones." Even in this early system, software development and project management became a prominent issue, as the number of programmers grew from a handful to more than 800, and as the programming group at the RAND almost outnumbered all other RAND employees.
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From page 114...
... The Air Force Y2K experience can be compared with current business writing on the important "people questions" to consider when executing a big software project. Representative of this category is Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister's Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (1999)
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From page 115...
... Just as a real estate developer needs to know what kinds of newly built communities will attract home buyers and sustain property values before they can succeed in the technical task of building houses, so the Air Force, faced with the Y2K threat, needed to look at its information and communication systems from the perspective of their use and evolution in an organizational context. The Y2K experience helped introduce the Air Force and other technology-based organizations to a human, organizational, and social perspective on technology risk.
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Key Terms

  • software development
  • government planning
  • technology risk
  • broader social
  • outage task

  • socially embedded
  • social categories
  • related examples
  • strategic goals
  • institutional setting

  • field reinforce
  • prominent issue
  • continuity planning
  • management structure
  • organizational missions

  • enterprise javabeans
  • ohio utility
  • consisting purely
  • inherent risks
  • estate developer

  • attract home
  • grid failure
  • temporary organizations
  • erroneous enthusiasms
  • single technological

  • triggered automated
  • electricity grid
  • terrorist attack
  • modern fields
  • programmers grew


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