Blurring Lines Between Technical and Cognitive Interoperability

Deck: 

Communication is Key to Success

Fortnightly Magazine - April 2017
This full article is only accessible by current license holders. Please login to view the full content.
Don't have a license yet? Click here to sign up for Public Utilities Fortnightly, and gain access to the entire Fortnightly article database online.

Do you remember the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft, which suffered a navigation mishap in 1999? It was pushed dangerously close to the planet's atmosphere, where it burned up and broke into pieces.

The accident occurred because one engineering team used metric units for a key spacecraft operation, while another used English units.

That was a one hundred twenty-five-million-dollar interoperability failure, plus years of work to get to that point.

The people who were recently stranded for twenty-four hours without food or water in the Australian desert can probably relate to that mistake.

They used Apple Maps to find the city of Mildura. Apple showed it at the end of a dirt road in the Australian bush, forty-four miles from its actual position.

This full article is only accessible by current license holders. Please login to view the full content.
Don't have a license yet? Click here to sign up for Public Utilities Fortnightly, and gain access to the entire Fortnightly article database online.