OUTSOURCING HORROR STORIES

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Here are four infamous IT outsourcing failures that offer valuable lessons in governance, vendor management, and strategic oversight:

💥 1. NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) – UK

• Scope: Digitize patient records across England’s NHS.

• Outsourcing Issue: Unrealistic scope, poor stakeholder engagement, and fragmented vendor coordination.

• Outcome: £12.7 billion spent; project largely abandoned.

• Lesson: Centralized control without local buy-in leads to resistance and waste.

💥 2. IBM & Queensland Health Payroll System – Australia

• Scope: Replace legacy payroll with a customized SAP system.

• Outsourcing Issue: Poor requirements gathering, inadequate testing, and misaligned workflows.

• Outcome: AUD $1.2 billion in remediation costs; years of payroll errors.

• Lesson: Customization without deep user validation can cripple operations.

💥 3. TSB Bank Migration – UK

• Scope: Transition to new Sabis banking platform.

• Outsourcing Issue: Data migration failures and lack of parallel testing.

• Outcome: £330 million in direct costs; reputational damage and customer compensation.

• Lesson: Critical systems need bulletproof migration plans and fallback options.

💥 4. Boeing 787 Dreamliner Supply Chain

• Scope: Outsourced global production of aircraft components.

• Outsourcing Issue: Poor coordination across international suppliers and quality control breakdowns.

• Outcome: $32+ billion in cost overruns; multi-year delays.

• Lesson: Outsourcing physical systems without tight integration leads to cascading failures.

These cases show that outsourcing can be inherently risky— because of misaligned incentives, weak oversight, and poor integration. Any of these can turn strategic partnerships into costly disasters. Why outsource anything strategic to your business?

Good heavens. I don't believe it. There must have been a whole bunch of dodgy advice given here !!

And we haven't even mentioned the Post Office fiasco...

If AI was that good....

You didn’t come this far to stop. Hire us now !!

Here are some AI cautionary tales

Here are four recent examples from 2025 where AI systems have hallucinated or made notable mistakes:

🤖 1. Fake Legal Citations by AI Chatbots

Several legal professionals reported that AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini generated nonexistent case law when asked for legal precedents. One lawyer submitted a brief with six fabricated citations, all of which were confidently presented by the AI as real.

🧪 2. Misleading Drug Interactions in Medical Advice

A popular AI-powered health assistant incorrectly advised that ibuprofen and warfarin could be safely taken together. In reality, this combination can increase bleeding risk. The hallucination was traced to outdated training data and lack of real-time pharmacological checks.

📰 3. Invented News Stories

An AI-generated news summary claimed that NASA had discovered liquid water on Mars in 2025, citing a fake press release. NASA later confirmed no such announcement had been made. The hallucination stemmed from speculative articles misinterpreted as factual.

🧠 4. False Historical Claims in Education Tools

An AI-powered tutoring app stated that Leonardo da Vinci invented the telescope, which is historically inaccurate. The telescope was invented by Hans Lippershey in the early 1600s—da Vinci died in 1519. The error was flagged during a classroom pilot.

These examples highlight the importance of human oversight, source verification, and contextual awareness when using AI tools—especially in high-stakes domains like law, medicine, and education.

Sources: AI [of course] forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/05/06/why-ai-hallucinations-are-worse-than-ever/

48% Error Rate: AI Hallucinations Rise in 2025 Reasoning Systems - Techopedia

AI Gone Wrong: AI Hallucinations & Errors [2025 - Updated Monthly]

September 2025: Spotify removes 75m AI spam tracks - Spotify reveals that it has removed 75,000,000 AI “spam” tracks from its streaming platform over the last year. Reportedly, the tracks in question rival the size of Spotify’s actual catalog.Wh at makes this such a big issue is that any stream that exceeds 30 seconds generates a royalty, meaning that scam artists have been collecting income and diluting payments to legitimate artists...

Artificial intelligence (AI) faces a troubling paradox in 2025: as AI reasoning models become more sophisticated in mathematical capabilities, they’re simultaneously generating more false information than ever before.

OpenAI’s latest reasoning systems, according to their own report, show hallucination rates reaching 33% for their o3 model and a staggering 48% for o4-mini when answering questions about public figures, more than double the error rate of previous systems.

This alarming trend challenges the fundamental assumption that more powerful AI systems are inherently more reliable. This goes way past technical curiosities. Businesses are increasingly using AI reasoning models in critical operations. Elevated error rates have serious risks to decision-making processes and public trust in AI.

Here's the OpenAI report: o3-and-o4-mini-system-card.pdf

Another avoidable situation

Who checks the checker? We will see if they pass our CQA examination Who put the CON into CONSULTANT?

Written by Matthew Field - Senior Technology Reporter. and Hannah Boland Retail Editor, 26 October 2025 7:00am GMT

Marks & Spencer has ditched the Indian IT outsourcing giant accused of being at fault for its devastating cyber attack earlier this year.

The retailer, which lost an estimated £300m from the hack, has ended a long-running contract with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to operate the FTSE 100 company’s technology helpdesk.

M&S cancelled the deal in July, just months after the crippling cyber hack forced it to shut down online sales for weeks and left shelves empty.

The Indian group denied it was at fault for the attack, but the move to end the contract so soon afterwards will raise questions over why it was not renewed..

WE CAN UPDATE YOUR SLA

and give it some teeth

The cloud providers try and dodge any responsibility - partly because their services are all tied up with each other. We can help you fix that.

Microsoft outage latest: Services restoring after hours-long IT failures at Azure hit 365, Xbox and more...

Widespread outage on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, was caused by an inadvertent tenant configuration change within Azure Front Door (AFD), a critical content delivery and routing service.

This faulty configuration led to a DNS failure, which disrupted traffic routing and caused significant latencies, timeouts, and connection errors across numerous Microsoft services and customer applications globally.

LET US CHECK YOUR SLA WITH YOUR CLOUD PROVIDERS. MAYBE IT NEEDS UPDATING.....