PART 1

  1. The technology was Amazon.com’s elastic compute cloud. This is a service that allows business to run applications through Amazon with out the need to provide them for their business. You can access cloud from any location since the applications are run on a server.
  2. The technology was considered a technical failure because the servers got overloaded with people trying to access the applications and which caused a lack of availability and caused some customer information to get deleted.
  3. 2010 information technology failures
  4. Evaluation of source

The author, Michael Krigsman has a B.A. from BardCollege and a M.B.A from BostonUniversity. He is currently the CEO of Asuret, Inc a consulting company which is a company that is committed to reducing technology implementation failures. He is a renowned authority on IT causes and prevention and is frequently a source of information in the press. He was previously the CEO of Cambridge Publications. He is a regular writer for ZDNET.com on IT failures. The purpose of this article is to inform and the author seems to be free of bias and affiliations that make skew his judgment in the article. This article was published May 2, 2011 and other articles talking about the cloud failure seem to give the same viewpoint.

Krigsman,Michael, CIO analysis: Examining Amazon’s cloud failure

PART 2

  1. PrincetonBaptistMedicalCenter performed used rfid to track hand hygiene and frequency to increase hand hygiene compliance. When engaging at a sanitation or hand washing station the rfid implanted in a badge tracks and measures whether the employee has engaged in a hand hygiene action using soap or alcohol.
  2. This was considered a strategic success because over the 7 month period there was a 22% overall decrease of nonsocomial infections.

Part 3

The IT industry can learn from its mistakes. The whole idea of IT to me is a failure and recalculation. Recently Sony had an it failure with their servers being hacked causing loss of connection for many of their customers. This has lost them money and time they will never get back. But Sony will come back stronger from this by learning how to prevent this from happening again. With out failures there is no way to make sure systems are working properly and can continue to improve over time.

Appendix A: Grading Criteria

Requirements / Maximum Points / Your Points
PART 1
a.. / 3
b / 7
c. / 3
d. / 5
PART 2
a. / 3
b. / 7
PART 3 / 2
TOTAL / 30