Maker of city’s new 911 computer system has history of failure

So far, New York’s $88 million computer-aided dispatch system by Alabama-based Intergraph Corp. (ICAD) has crashed four times in three days.

I spent forty years in Telecom and 911 police and fire systems were the one system I never installed or maintained. They were very specialized, the hours the engineers and techs worked also sucked. And as I’ve mentioned before, I hate customers who are carrying guns while you are working with them. The banking systems I focused on the last ten years of my career were bad enough, millions of dollars an hour or billions per day at stake if the system failed. 911 systems are a whole another level of pressure.

I was struck by this statement; (Police Commissioner Ray Kelly) defended system, saying the old one was 40 years old and had outdated technology.

Yes, BUT IT WORKED!   That kills me, at my last site, the SL100/DMS100 system at BOA had been initially installed in the early 80’s and constantly upgraded almost every year. Best of all, it was paid for.  But consultants don’t make any money telling the customer that the existing system doesn’t need to be replaced. Besides, listen to my voice as I speak the buzzword, “Voice Over IP!!!”.    So they replaced the Legacy system with a Cisco VoIP…which failed three times in the first year. (wow,  what a surprise…who could’a seen that coming)

We (the Telecom Techs) used to laugh when we saw how the computer (IT) geeks operated. They walked in the door and made a beeline for the RESET switch, first time and every time. We said to ourselves, “Could you imagine what would happen to us if we dropped the system and killed dial tone in the middle of the day like that?“.  And,”As long as those dorks operate like that, we don’t have to worry about anyone giving them control of the voice network!“.  Of course that is what happened and the reason that it did happen was that over time, almost all the managers and all the college trained consultants were IT/Computer oriented. Once they worked their way up into the management levels, everything became clock cycles and network speed, the latest and greatest tech and Apps…God I hate “Apps”. Another thing they changed was the attitude towards the person sitting at that desk, Voice Guys still referred to them as “the Customer”.  To the IT people they became, “Workstation users”.  Voice techs asked them, “What are your needs?”.   IT techs told them, “You have been assigned this profile, and your profile only gets this.”.

I can’t really say what the real problems are with the NYC 911 system, but I suspect that somewhere at sometime prior to loss of service, in some secret closet or IT Center a computer geek pushed a button labeled “Reset”.