London Ambulance Service Computer Aided Dispatch (Lascad)
London Ambulance Service Computer Aided Dispatch (LASCAD)
What are the major problems with the design and implementation of the system?
The main objective of the LASCAD software application was to leverage the power of automation to provide better/improved service to its end users (patients and their relatives in this case) as the existing manual process was deemed time consuming and error prone
We know from the caselet that all stakeholders considered the implementation of LASCAD a failure. Though the question is about the flaws in design and implementation that led to this failure, we will take this opportunity to discuss all the broad reasons over the entire SDLC that caused this failure.
For large system implementations like LASCAD to fail, the reasons are far more complex and greater in number than design flaws and implementation errors. Moreover wrong decisions at any step seem to have a corresponding adverse domino effect on subsequent steps and this leads to a vicious circle of both manual and automated processes going wrong leading the system to behave incorrectly/incoherently and lastly hang/jam/become unusable in case of LASCAD
The first major root cause for the design/implementation to go wrong was the "high unrealistic expectations" the LAS management had of this application. They wanted a fully operational system by a date (Jan 8, 1992) that was not estimated taking into account both the scope and technicalities of the application, the steps involved in development and testing ahead of deployment and time required for each of them. The management turned a deaf error to the concerns raised by several vendors that this date was impractical and not feasible.
The second root cause was the commercial/political pressure to award the contract to the lowest bidder and not necessarily to the one who is most qualified to do it. It is now known that the consortium that won the contract had quoted a substantially lower price than the closest
What are the major problems with the design and implementation of the system?
The main objective of the LASCAD software application was to leverage the power of automation to provide better/improved service to its end users (patients and their relatives in this case) as the existing manual process was deemed time consuming and error prone
We know from the caselet that all stakeholders considered the implementation of LASCAD a failure. Though the question is about the flaws in design and implementation that led to this failure, we will take this opportunity to discuss all the broad reasons over the entire SDLC that caused this failure.
For large system implementations like LASCAD to fail, the reasons are far more complex and greater in number than design flaws and implementation errors. Moreover wrong decisions at any step seem to have a corresponding adverse domino effect on subsequent steps and this leads to a vicious circle of both manual and automated processes going wrong leading the system to behave incorrectly/incoherently and lastly hang/jam/become unusable in case of LASCAD
The first major root cause for the design/implementation to go wrong was the "high unrealistic expectations" the LAS management had of this application. They wanted a fully operational system by a date (Jan 8, 1992) that was not estimated taking into account both the scope and technicalities of the application, the steps involved in development and testing ahead of deployment and time required for each of them. The management turned a deaf error to the concerns raised by several vendors that this date was impractical and not feasible.
The second root cause was the commercial/political pressure to award the contract to the lowest bidder and not necessarily to the one who is most qualified to do it. It is now known that the consortium that won the contract had quoted a substantially lower price than the closest