Yup,, all boils down to Lotus 123 and the accounts director inheriting the IT director mantle, as the only department using computers at the time. Lovely orange or green text on black. LOL!
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Misery loves company:
Governments doing IT-Project and involves Health Department.
You wouldn’t get a better outcome in Switzerland.
Ironically we’ve now a major supply problem due to a Roche warehouse problem.
At least we’re all sharing the pain 
Here’s another article about spreadsheets used when they should not be used. It contains a section about a flawed analysis that served as a ‘scientific’ basis for austerity politics.
https://theconversation.com/excel-errors-the-uk-government-has-an-embarrassingly-long-history-of-spreadsheet-horror-stories-147606
The article includes some unbelievable cases @Torsten and I’m sure the UK isn’t alone, let alone all the businesses worldwide. It is worth Googling ‘ worldwide economy excel errors’ and look at the results, which are horrifying.
This article Spreadsheet blunders costing business billions claims ‘ that 88 percent of all spreadsheets have errors in them, while 50 percent of spreadsheets used by large companies have material defects’.
Regards
Andy
The software industry isn’t regulated. Hence there is little communication about design limitations (apart from the usual ‘you cannot use this software for controlling aircraft, run a nuclear power plant or live support device’).
How could software industry be regulated ? If the regulators are not knowledgeable of this industry, how may they regulate it ? Again nice talking people from Cracker Jack University will provide good advises (ahem) to them, and the result will still be the same.
But the paper published by THE Harvard University is the TOP of these horrors. That means even reputed scientists are using spreadsheets the wrong way 
All of this was brought by the democratization of computers, the PC. If Universities and Government can go wrong with spreadsheets, imagine SMB.
Yes, even in regulated industries software things can go wrong. Aeronautics is witness to that. At least, things would not go wrong the same way a hundred times if there was a reporting and publication system in place for design limitations, errors and occurrences.
A perfect system will never exist and cannot prevent gross negligence on the user side, but it can help raising awareness.
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This was posted on a UK NHS political group’s website and shared on social media by a radiologist friend, which made me laugh:
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This is also a lovely one:
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/12/who_me/
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