What Is The Lascad Failure

In 1992, London Ambulance Service Computer Aided Dispatch (LASCAD) system failed to dispatch ambulances and this failure resulted in 20-30 people's death. The main reason for system failure was due to the failure in the business environment. The LAS is the largest ambulance services in the world and the demand for emergency services has progressively increased with annual growth rate of 16 per cent over the years. When there was unusual number of emergency calls on the night of 26 October, the system failed to handle with these calls because it could not cope with the capacity and speed of business process needs effectively (Ward & Peppard, 2002). In addition, data failure came from the operators who could not handle the messages generated
The new chief executive, Martin Gorham and his team thought it was best to begin for a certain stable time and observe the service to avoid risks of the same problem. Ian Tighe, the new IT director indeed spent nine months to learn about the service and outline the strategy for new system. Even if the dispatch software was developed in-house, the strategy was to implement the system slowly in small simple chunks using prototype approach due to a review which concluded both of software and hardware were insufficient for the LAS. In addition, the staged approach was adopted with a little more added at each stage when the new computerized system was introduced and it took 18 months to develop and implement. Except gradual pace of change, they used familiar business solution and technology innovation because the staff trusted the existing manual
The staffs were either against the new rostering system or afraid for new computer system at the begin, they were willing to accept these changes eventually because participative approach was used. The open forum which was one of the techniques of participative approach was employed and all the stakeholders can discuss requirements, design procedures, forms, etc in forums. Another approach employed was prototyping such as management of the resources. It made the users to discuss the development about these resources such as ambulances, locations and deployment. This relieved the tensional relationship between the management and staffs. On the other hand, LAS spent large amount money to change the infrastructure and technological investment. Senior management staffs were willing to spend lots of time and effort to training the users on the computer system and all the procedures. Therefore, the staffs was willing to accept the computerized system. Meanwhile, the public and the politicians were impress about IT contribution to the LAS and complaints reduced rapidly. The risks of likely reaction was minimum because of high support from