Poor IT Team

So, unless you've been living in a cave (and since Osama's living in a cave, that's probably not an excuse), you know about the attempted bombing of that plane around Christmas. And you've heard all the hullaballoo about lack of responsibility, where does the buck stop, etc, etc.

The media has been justifiably hard on The Powers That Be. How could this happen, post 9/11? But then, I read the details. I see the complaints about "how hard is it to follow and connect data" and "misspelling of suspect's name not caught" in a completely different light. And I think I know why no one was fired.

I imagine there's a 25 man (person, sorry) dba team somewhere whose job it is to make 172 archaic database systems talk to each other. They're probably given a nightly batch window to synch these db's that's 40 minutes long. None of the db's is probably newer than 2005, and most are probably older than 2000. Things like spelling correction and fancy google like searches just aren't possible.

My guess is that the intelligence problem in this case was completely database driven. And when only 2 people know how any given database system works, any manager is hard pressed to fire either of them.

Have I mentioned how glad I am to be a teacher these days?

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