Risks Digest 23.60 The coming catastrophe in German social services

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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 compensating
people who do not work (Arbeitslosenhilfe and Sozialhilfe, money for 
people
who have worked but their unemployment insurance has run out and social
services 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-page
application 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 system
overloaded. 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 sometimes
die, 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 do
overtime 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 are
being 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 that
possibly 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 of
systems 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/

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