Blame the machine

Computer system glitch slows rush to pay fines
KUALA LUMPUR: Thousands of motorists in the country were unable to check and pay their fines when the traffic police’s main on-line computer system at Bukit Aman went down for three hours yesterday.

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In Malaysia, it is common to say "technical problem" and "system down". And the miracle of using these terms is: nobody will be blame except the machine. Sound unfair to the machine and thousand of Malaysian would be sue by the machine if machine could talk. What happen to the technical support, the system designer, the programmer that wrote the system, the networking person and the internet service provider?

People get to run away from their responsibility by saying these terms. The consumer who never get serious on technology would not mind on it. Afterall, they still prefer the traditional way by holding the misconception that technology is not reliable.

For sure, this attitude could stop the nation towards the goal of a modern high tech IT society. The party that operates the system should first create trust among the user; and reliability is part of the trust.

Developers have to be aware that developing a large scale online application for such large amount of user is not just about coding. Optimization is the hardest part. You can't do it without prediction, statistic collection and analysing. I am sad that local people here put more focus on the suger coat than these underlying things.

Government should not always chase blindly for the latest technology before completely research and study on it. No system can be just setup one time and leave it there. You need a good maintenance team who keep on monitoring and update the system. And oftenly, the on-going cost is higher than the initial setup cost!