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> Software doesn’t make or break an organization.

As someone who works for an organization that is on the receiving end of bad software, I can assure you this is not the case. There is lost opportunity, due to decreased productivity and outright lost clients. There is a souring of the work environment, an environment where people are constantly putting out fires and there is constant churn in staff because of that.

Perhaps the organization I work for is unique in that it is public sector and cannot go out of business (which appears to be the author's definition of broken). Perhaps the author has never dealt with software where edge cases involving lost and phantom data is a daily norm. Clients, real people with real lives, are literally lost by the system.

Things are so bad that losing several years of business records (or, more likely, paying to have them maintained by a retired system for some legally defined period) is considered as a viable option.

So yes, buggy software does break organizations.



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