- 99 -
technological uncertainty." This conclusion, Dr. McDermott
claimed, is bolstered by a statement of Brian Phillips, former
president of NTS, that SBS had a 50-percent chance of failure at
the outset of the project.
Dr. Davis stated that the SBS project was within the then-
current state of the art and asserted that any uncertainties could
be eliminated through information that was reasonably available to
Norwest. Further, he claimed that any risks that existed during
the project were attributable to business risk, not technical risk,
despite the large-scale nature of the project.
Mr. Teixeira, in the Tower Group report, contended that the
SBS customer module was first implemented by GMAC, a division of
General Motors, in 1990, and involved nearly five times as many
accounts. He further explained that the failure of SBS was due to
continual changes in the banking industry and the growth of banks
such as Norwest and Bank One and was not due to technical risks.
Mr. Teixeira attributed innovative qualities in the SBS project to
the building of the customer module as the centerpiece of an
integrated banking system and the use of the PACBASE development
environment. A July 1993 Tower Group report was more generous in
describing the SBS project, noting it as a "monumental effort * *
* based on providing a bank with state of the art technology". The
July 1993 report also stated that the customer module had the
ability to contain up to 12,000 pieces of data, or six times more
than any other system available.
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