Then, in the infinite wisdom of the powers on high, our CIO got approval to make all these changes simultaneously, during a one-week roll-out! I warned the CIO that the proverbial snowball in hell would have a better chance of success than this ill-advised rush to disaster. But he assured me that his staff would be able to handle any problems.

The roll-out started on Friday evening. By Saturday morning we were crippled. The only functional apps were an old Exchange server and the staff time-clock software running on the old server. The CIO and his staff of help-desk technicians had reserved Sunday for testing. But nothing was working, and the level of chaos was so intense nobody knew what to test first.

Any first-term computer science student would have known that a more incremental, staged transition would have had a better chance of success. For much of the week the transition team threw money at Microsoft, Citrix, our medical-records application vendor, an IT consulting group, and the new datacenter hosting company, trying to isolate, identify, and repair the vast number of issues that had arisen. The CIO spent the week hiding from a small army of inside staffers and outside consultants, all of whom were waiting in line to call him bad names.

By 5 p.m. Thursday things were beginning to work, and by mid-day Friday I was reasonably confident that we were able to care for our patients. I had been worried that a patient might die because of the deranged state of our systems. But we got lucky, and no one suffered physical harm. On the other hand, my best guess is that during the course of this week we spent roughly twice the half-million dollars that had been allocated for the upgrade.

To my surprise, the CIO hasn't been fired. Maybe that's because HR can't find his records.