dolution

DUI in a Golf Cart

Swedish police stopped Bill Murray and charged him with drunk driving when he attempted to drive his golf cart around the city. A golf cart hits top speed at three miles per hour and although it might seem odd that you can be issued a DUI for driving one, many countries have laws against such practices. A few other culture blunders you want to avoid include the following:

¦ One American company learned that the name of the cooking oil they were marketing translated as “jackass oil” in Spanish.

¦ A deodorant marketing campaign displayed images of a strong, courageous man washing his dog. The campaign failed in Islamic countries, where dogs are considered unclean.

¦ A sports equipment company packaged golf balls in groups of four for sales throughout Japan. Sales plummeted because the word four pronounced in Japanese sounds the same as the word death and items packaged in fours are considered unlucky.

Companies that are expanding globally are looking for opportunities, not problems. Yet local laws and procedures that come into play when setting up shop abroad—everything from hiring and firing to tax filings—can be a minefield.

Questions:

1. What types of culture, language, and legal issues should a company expect to encounter when dealing with outsourcing to another country?
2. What can a company do to mitigate these risks?

Flawed Development

Data must be secure! A computer programming course would teach you that security is a critical component that must be included in every system. Apparently, the employees that developed the new system for the state of Oklahoma were out sick during this important class. The new system mistakenly posted confidential data, including Social Security numbers, for thousands of Oklahoma residents on the state’s website. The really unfortunate part of this systems blunder is that the error went unnoticed for more than three years. A programmer found the error when he realized that by changing his web browser he could redirect his page to the entire database for the state of Oklahoma. To make matters even worse, due to development issues, a hacker could have easily changed all the data in the database or added false data to elements such as the state’s Sexual and Violent Offender Registry.

Questions:

1. Why is it important to secure data?
2. What can happen if someone accesses your customer database?
3. What could happen if someone changes the information in your customer database and adds fictitious data?
4. What phases in the systems development life cycle should have found these errors?
5. How could these errors go unnoticed for over three years?
6. Who should be held responsible for the system issues?