Date: Thu, 20 Oct 94 15:40:08 PDT
From: RISKS Forum <risks@csl.sri.com>
Subject: RISKS DIGEST 16.47

RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Thursday 20 October 1994  Volume 16 : Issue 47

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Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 11:55:19 -0700
From: Phil Agre <pagre@ucsd.edu>
Subject: Computer mess at Greyhound

The 20 Oct 1994 Wall Street Journal contains an article about computerization
at Greyhound that you'll have to read to believe.  The full reference is:

  Robert Tomsho, How Greyhound Lines re-engineered itself right into a deep
  hole, Wall Street Journal, 20 October 1994, pages A1, A10.

After Greyhound came out of bankruptcy a few years ago, a new management 
team declared that they would revolutionize the company but cutting costs 
and creating a huge computerized reservations system to replace the existing
collection of incompatible systems and things done by hand.  They called it
"re-engineering".  Wall Street liked this idea and bid up the company's stock
price.  The managers, feeling obliged to keep the stock price up, promised
that the system would work on schedule.

But of course it didn't, for reasons that won't surprise Risks readers.  The
main problem is that buses make many more stops than airplanes, meaning that a
bus scheduling system is an order of magnitude harder to build than an airline
scheduling system, which is already one of the most complex things anybody
ever built.  The system started slipping behind schedule, and the prototype
had a terrible interface, crashed all the time, and hung up on people.

Meanwhile, Greyhound was falling apart.  Employee turnover was very high,
customer service was terrible, the computer was messing up everything it
touched, and the company advertised a discount program even though it had 
no chance of handling the expected volume of business.  Yet the stock price
stayed high because stock analysts, who make dramatically more money than
Greyhound's customers, don't ride buses and so didn't see the problems.  This
postponed the day of reckoning long enough to cause tremendous disruption for
the customers -- and long enough for the top managers of the company to cash
in a pile of options while the stock was still at its highest level.

  "Looking back, Mr. [Thomas] Thompson [the vice president in charge of
   developing the system] says, "I should have quit or just said that
   I couldn't do it."  Instead, most copies of his report [warning of
   difficulties with the system] were destroyed, and any mention of it
   was purged from many Greyhound agendas, calendars and computer files,
   many people say."

It's distressing that words like "re-engineering" can have such magical force
for so many people that well-known pitfalls in system implementation can go
undetected for so long -- except, of course, by the working people who have
to use the systems or get around on the bus.

Phil Agre, UCSD

    [But don't wait for Greyhound to put on the dog.  PGN]

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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 16.47 
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