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Risks Digest 23.60 The coming catastrophe in German social services
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 16:41:59 -0500
Begin forwarded message: Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 22:04:39 +0100 From: Debora Weber-Wulff <weberwu () fhtw-berlin de> Subject: The coming catastrophe in German social services On 1 Jan 2005 Germany will switch over from two systems for compensatingpeople who do not work (Arbeitslosenhilfe and Sozialhilfe, money for people
who have worked but their unemployment insurance has run out and socialservices payment for the poor) to a new one, Arbeitslosengeld II, called ALG II or Hartz IV (after the guy who chaired the commission that thought this
mess up). In order to make sure that no one hides any assets there is a 16-pageapplication form that needs to be filled out and all sorts of documentation supplied. It takes an official at the public offices about an hour to put
all of this information into the central system just for one person. Germany's jobless rate is at about 10% of the population.or 4.2 million people officially registered, I could not find the number of people on Sozialhilfe. The system, however, was not finished on time. The time for starting the data entry kept being slipped. When the data entry began, not all of the workers could enter data at the same time, because the systemoverloaded. The system has to be rebooted every day at lunch time, because
otherwise it would be too slow in the afternoon. (Anyone hear hanging processes screaming?). The data connections are very slow, and sometimesdie, taking all of the data entered up until now with them. It can take up
to an hour for the data entry station to permit a new logon.If data entered is incomplete (and it often is, as someone missed one of the
many questions) the system automatically deletes the record after about three or four weeks. Last week, a software update was put on the central system in Nürnberg, crashing the system so completely, that the backup had to be restored a day later. (At least they had one!). In desperation some office managers pleaded with their workers to doovertime and come in on the weekend to enter data. But there was a fire in
the central computing system and no data could be entered at all.Amazingly, they have managed to calculate some of the payouts and send the information to the people receiving them. But since they do not yet have all
of the forms and cannot put in all of the data in time, many offices arebeing forced to just pay people some money in January and figure out later
if it was too much or too little. So we pretty much have a great example of everything going wrong thatpossibly can - one wonders perhaps why Germany has so many of these projects at the moment: this, the TollCollect scheme, the health card proposed for
2006, etc. There's a nice article in c't (in German) on why large software projects don't work in Germany: (c't 23/2004, IT-Großprojekte: Warum so viele Vorhaben scheitern, S. 218) It ranges from people without knowledge ofsystems deciding what to implement to the politics of procurement. And, of
course, a good bit of wishful thinking - hoping that computers can cure problems that have deeper causes. Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, FHTW Berlin, Treskowallee 8, 10313 Berlin Tel: +49-30-5019-2320 http://www.f4.fhtw-berlin.de/people/weberwu/ ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- Risks Digest 23.60 The coming catastrophe in German social services David Farber (Nov 27)