Taylor Made Owens (44 page)

“Yes,” Kristen answered with a frightened frown. “Bob Owens.”

“Do you think he’d be good at evaluating a computer system?”

“He’d be tremendous at anything he put his mind to. Don’t tell me you want him to evaluate our system?”

“Yes. You need to ask him if he would be good enough to do it.”

“No, Miriam, please don’t ask me to do that. I can’t. He makes me wretched.”

“But this is an emergency. We need that system up and running, as you well know. It cannot go into full operation without an evaluation.”

“But there must be dozens of evaluators out there.”

“There’s only five thousand dollars available for it, so he would have to do it mostly as a favor to you.”

“Why only five thousand? After they spent four million on the system?”

“I don’t know. The steering committee didn’t say. Will you ask Dr. Owens to help?” Kristen looked disconcerted and shuffled around. Miriam continued, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll call him and ask him to come over here about a small consulting assignment. I’ll mention you’ll be here.”

“All right.”

Miriam made the call, and Robert agreed to come for a meeting the next afternoon.

The next day, Kristen came to the meeting ten minutes late, looking harried. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “A little trouble with a patient.” Too nervous to look at Robert, she glanced at him and fixed her eyes on the floor.

Miriam said, “I had just begun telling Dr. Owens about the assignment, but warned him that the budget was five thousand dollars.” She turned to Robert and said, “So, what can you do for us?”

“I need much more information before I can answer that. I assume it’s a simple system with so little available for the evaluation?”

“Well, I’m not sure how to answer that,” said Miriam. “I’ve never even seen it in action, and even if I had, I wouldn’t be able to assess its level of complexity.”

“Do you know how much was spent on it?”

“Uh, four million dollars?”

Robert looked at her in disbelief. “You’re kidding,” he said. She shook her head. “Leaving aside my shock at how you could have possibly spent so much money for a database, I just want to confirm that you set aside five thousand bucks to evaluate a four million-dollar system?” Both women nodded. He chuckled. “Sounds like you don’t really want it evaluated. Afraid of something?”

“Blunt as always, Bob,” observed Kristen. “We have absolutely nothing to hide, and I don’t like the insinuation that we do. If I wanted to hide something, I would keep you as far away as possible.”

“What she means is—” started Miriam.

“Excuse me, Miriam, but her meaning is clear,” interrupted Robert. “I’m sorry to have accused you two of that, but it’s clear to me someone doesn’t want this evaluated. Who decided on the amount?”

“The steering committee for the system.”

“So they’re the culprits, eh? My next guess is that no one would take on this job with no money attached, so go to the one computer scientist either of you knows. Right?”

“If you don’t want to do it, just say so,” said Kristen.

“Kristen, please,” scolded her boss. “Dr. Owens has—”

“Bob,” he said.

“Bob has been good enough to come here and hear us out. You’re very shrewd, Bob. No one else will help us. Will you?”

As he considered the proposition, Kristen added with softened tone, “It’s important for the center. We need a good computer system for adequate patient care and for research purposes. You can help out sick children by helping us.”

“I’ll need complete access to the system along with relevant documentation and information on its development. And I’ll need to meet with the developers and the steering committee.”

“So you’ll do it?” asked Miriam

“Yes. I’m doing it for the children’s sake,” he claimed. Both women thanked him, and he set up a meeting with the steering committee and representatives of the design team for the next Monday.

At that meeting, he was given the beta copy of the system and hundreds of pages of documents. He asked lots of questions about system development and got more uneasy with each response.
A patchwork quilt system developed by committee
, he concluded to himself as the meeting came to an end. He took the material home and worked three long weeks on it. He also attended the initial training session with center staff. Kristen was there, but she sat on the opposite side of the room and kept her eyes away from him.

Three weeks later, his evaluation report was submitted to the steering committee. The report pulled no punches, as the point-form summary illustrates:

• The system is so full of bugs, it gives you cooties just to log on. From little surprises such as, “Your access to patient files is unauthorized! Your access is terminated. Your user ID will be transmitted to the police for possible criminal prosecusion [sic],” to continual crashes, there are far too many flaws to list. Perhaps the developers are hoping the users will identify all the problems for them, and they can respond to each, with a hefty tab for each consultation and fix.
  
• The firewall is defective. Without a valid user ID and password, I was able to hack into the “hacker proof” system and gain access to confidential patient information in just four minutes.
  
• The system is incredibly complex. There are tens of thousands of lines of code, which is what you get when you pay computer programmers four million dollars to write code. As with any other consultant, they will happily take whatever you pay them and expand the amount of work to justify the charges. (I wasn’t supposed to be able to see the source code, but it was easy to get to, which verifies the system is liable to attack from hackers.) This complexity is the system’s Achilles’ Heel. It will be astonishingly difficult to maintain. Frequent crashes are a certainty, and fixes will take time since there’s so much complexity.
  
• The unnecessary complexity will cause problems for years to come, part of the benefits to computer consultants for designing such a monstrosity. Once the final system is delivered, desperate users will be calling them constantly to get help through the labyrinth. Healthcare workers will get hopelessly lost and rebel in quick time if this is foisted on them.
  
• The training module was cast at too high a level for the typical user, a reflection of the system itself. By the end of the first hour, most trainees had a look of panic on their faces. They had asked innumerable questions, most of which got no satisfactory response. Many were saying, “This is impossible!” and “I refuse to work with this!” and several other colorful comments that would make a marine blush. By the end of hour two, most had given up, their minds far away from this nightmare.
  
• Incredibly, despite a four million-dollar price tag—I keep mentioning this, I know, but it’s just so unbelievable—the system has no reporting capability. That is considered an “upgrade”—a multi-million-dollar one no doubt. So, the Centre can put data in, but get nothing out on any systematic basis. If you want to know something about what medicines little Johnny has gotten, the system can tell you that, assuming you can navigate your way through it. But if you want to be able to assess the efficacy of a particular drug in treating certain types of cancer, the system as it stands can’t help you. Thus, the system is useless for research purposes and little better for monitoring purposes.
  
• The university will have to continue pouring good money after bad into expensive consultants for fixes, upgrades, user support and probably psychiatrist fees.
  

He concluded, “The only wise course of action would be to scrap the new system and sue the consultant to recover the money spent on it and begin again from scratch. A much better system could be devised for a fraction of the cost.”

In his cover letter, he reiterated this conclusion and added, “The steering committee will no doubt have grave concerns about this conclusion. To admit to a four million-dollar mistake will take courage, but there is no other responsible option. Should you decide to proceed with the current computer system, my recommendation is to start working up excuses and setting up fall guys now for its inevitable demise within a month of its unveiling.”

A
s can be imagined, the steering committee was not amused with the report, and the computer consultants were outraged and threatening a lawsuit. They bridled at the “unprofessional tone,” “unjust vitriol,” and “unsubstantiated allegations.” The committee directed him to “re-write the report in a more professional and balanced manner,” warning that he wouldn’t be paid for the assignment until he did so.

He responded, “How ironic you’re more perturbed at this ‘unprofessional’ little five thousand-dollar report than at the unprofessional, huge four million-dollar boondoggle. As I expected, since your only other option is to admit to a spectacular mistake, you are aiming to shoot the messenger. You’ll have me re-writing until all the damning evidence is extirpated. I refuse. Keep your money. The I-told-you-so will be so much more rewarding.”

This put the center and university in an untenable situation. They couldn’t simply bury the report because the center was required to evaluate the system and report on it to the government. If they hired another expert reviewer, they would have to explain to the auditor why, which might bring the study to light.

Their first tactic was to send in someone to reason with him. And who better for this than the diplomatic star of the new center who knew the expert reviewer?

Kristen demurred, knowing that Robert’s work was unassailable—even if the report was unnecessarily inflammatory—and that he would never change the findings on principle. Besides, being near him was intimidating for her. The chairman of the steering committee begged her to reconsider.

“If this report goes forward as is, the government may halt the work of the whole center. They’ll question the entire setup,” he warned. She reluctantly agreed to speak to Robert.

Nervously, she walked to his office, a small, hot windowless basement room he shared with two graduate student teaching assistants. The door was open. She knocked and walked in.

“Kristen,” he said. “To what do I owe the honor of your visit to the poor side of town?”

“Well, um,” she began with a noticeable tremor in her voice, “I’ve been sent here to, um, talk to you about your report.”

“Did you like it?”

“You enjoy provoking people, don’t you? Why must—”

“Wait, I want to bask in your praise for a minute.”

“I’m sure your facts, findings, and inferences are beyond reproach, but the way you put things, it subjects the report and the author to denunciation, if not derision. You undermine what you’re trying to achieve. Levity has its place, but not in—”

“Dr. Taylor,” he interrupted. “Are you here to shoot me?”

“The committee is desperate. They begged me to talk to you even though I knew it would do no good, so to keep my word to them, I’ll just ask before I go, can you please just work on some of the wording to make it less confrontational?”

“That’s rather brusque of you. Let me respond in kind: No.”

“Thank you for your time, Dr. Owens. Goodbye.”

“You made a mistake, Dr. Taylor,” he said as she turned to leave.

“Obviously. I know how stubborn you can be, yet I came against my better judgment.”

“No—well, yes, I am stubborn—but I mean your mistake was getting involved in this fiasco. You need to distance yourself from it. This system will fail, Kristen. I needed to make that crystal clear, hence the strong language. They’ll be looking for scapegoats. Don’t get caught in the mess.”

“This system is very important to my center. It’s critical that it work properly for the children’s sake. You pointed out fatal flaws, and I want the committee to take them seriously. If you’d just be more diplomatic—”

“You don’t get it. You’re brilliant, I know, but you’ve never really understood the dark side of man’s nature. The report spells out plainly what the problems are and makes dozens of suggestions for improvement, but those are band aids for a cadaver. I’ve made a rock solid case for starting over. The committee just has to have the gumption to go with it. But they won’t because they’re worried about their reputations, which I gather are worth more than four million dollars.

“What a defective system means for the university or the important work your center will do, they care much less about. They even worry more about the feelings of the poor embarrassed consultants and the lawsuit they’re threatening. What chutzpah, to sell such garbage for the moon, then turn around and threaten to sue a disgruntled customer. They won’t sue because they built a terrible system and I’ve proven it; they wouldn’t dare risk the publicity. But, again, the committee lacks the courage to face them.

“What they actually want is for me to either withdraw my report or to whitewash it. It’s not going to happen, because whether you believe it or not, Kristen, I have integrity and I value it. I always tell the truth.”

“Of course I believe that, but where does that leave the center?”

“In a quagmire created by incompetence.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“Other than designing a new system, no,” he said, as he sat in his rickety chair with his arms folded.

“Are you offering to do that? Can I take that to the committee?”

“Darkness, Kristen. It’s all around you, but you’re incapable of seeing it. They cannot abandon what they’ve built; their reputations and jobs depend on it. If you pass along my offer, they’ll say I had an interest in trashing their system, which will give them the excuse they need to trash the report and me. On the other hand, I don’t want sick kids in jeopardy because of this. I’ll leave it up to you, but you have to back me on this.”

“You’re so cynical.”

“And you’re so naïve.”

She left.

Kristen raised the quandary with Mark. He asked to read the report. The next day he came back shaking his head. “This guy has no political instincts at all,” he opined. “No wonder everyone got their backs up. I’d have reacted the same if he were attacking me.”