Do You Know Where the Problems Are?

In Arizona, there are prisoners still behind bars who should have been released. The reason: The software that calculates their release date hasn’t implemented a 2019 law change. With this being just one of the 14,000 bugs (!) reported on the system, these people can potentially stay locked up for a long time yet. Officials claim there is no problem and their manual process flawlessly implements a complicated rule estimated to take 2,000 hours to program.

It is a leadership decision to decide what gets implemented first. And this one should be at the top of the list – right after the bug that means gang affiliation is not properly recorded, and members of warring gangs might end up in the same cell…

A desparate whistleblower finally went to a local radio station with this story after having been ignored internally for a year. As the CIO, do you have a method in place that ensures concerned programmers and users have a way to point out critical issues?