June 2010 Edition
Computer Science Department, University of Cape Town
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You may find that we have been rather pessimistic in this unit. We have been roundly rude about several working systems and we have also been roundly rude about the developers of those systems. We have questioned the value of implementing IT systems in the first place and described some extremely unpleasant consequences of the failure of safety critical interactive systems.
The conclusions we want you to take from this unit are as follows:
Implementing IT is not a panacea, and will not automatically increase the productivity of your business.
Programmers are very good at programming and should be celebrated at such. But because someone is good at solving problems in implementing software, it does not mean that they are good at solving human work problems. Cooper's thesis is not that programmers are bad at their jobs, but that they are doing in effect too much; they are designing systems for users when that is not their skill. There should be people skilled in this area as a complementary part of the design team.
If users are considered to be part of safety critical systems and not external to them, then the systems can be designed to take better account of user behaviour. Safety critical systems will therefore be less likely to fail owing to ‘operator error'. ‘Operator error' should not exonerate system developers from blame for system failure.
Mechanisms (legal, ethical and standardisation) exist in many other areas of engineering to motivate engineers to improve their product. There is no reason why these mechanisms should not apply to interactive systems.
If this unit has been negative in tone, by pointing out problems, subsequent units should be more positive, by suggesting solutions.