Good systems can go bad

Build a good system with an advanced technology. Win praises for it. Use it for your business for many years. Fix only what breaks, even as the environment changes. Deny all criticisms. Good systems cannot go bad. Or can they?

Recently, I came across a few electronic car park systems. The car park lot availability counters were easy for drivers to read from afar. The barriers at the entrances had friendly messages and even creative advertising space. The systems could automatically detect the contactless cashcard in the car. The barriers were automatically and steadily raised for cars to enter the car park. There was just one problem with all of them: Even after taking into consideration possible business reasons for a margin of error, they counted the number of available car park lots wrongly.

So your organization has a state-of-the-art Infocomm system. Wait, was it state of the art, circa 1980s? Does the system still do well at what it was primarily built to do? Do your staff members and, where applicable, customers still consider it state of the art?

SOURCE: zdnet.com