The Great It Horror Story

The Great IT Horror Story

INTRODUCTION

John Mentor

(Consultant in charge of the project)

Peter Craven

Boss and founder of Craven Books.

Journalist

: Excuse me, do you mind if we have a couple of words?

John

: What is it about?

Journalist

: It’s about your involvement in a company called Craven Books.

John

: Craven Books? Forget it. I don’t want to talk about it.

Craven Books – distributers of specialist comics, especially horror comics. But this company

has its own horror story to tell. Much worse than any in the magazine itself.A computer horror

story.

Peter

: Well, when I started I was about 13 or 14 and this is about 1963, 1964. I

have many collections of comics that I let people borrow off me.

And by the time I am 18, I have been selling these comics to people. They

don’t want to just buy any comic books, but rather want to buy like

collections …. a run of Spiderman, Batman.

We didn’t really do anything, it just happens. One day, we sort of selling

comics here and there, and the next minute we got a warehouse. I got people

working for me. Banks used to say we want to give you money. You got to

expand and..so we contacted publishers and the whole thing just took off.

1

By the late 90s, Craven was at the peak of its success. It was one of the leading players in the

market, selling books as well as magazines. Now it is a shadow of its former self. Turnover

and staff level has been more than half.

How was it that a computer system could cause such devastation? Computers are supposed to

help businesses. Aren’t they?

Claire Burroughs

(General Manager)

Claire

Jane Armitage

(ex employee)

Tony Grain

(Ex-IT Manager)

: Alright, well this is it. This is the warehouse.

In the good old days, we were twice this size but everything’s scaled down

now. In the old days, we could take in orders more up to 10,000 in some

days. But now, we are back to doing what we do best – which is Horror

Magazines.

Journalist

: Is that what people behind you are doing?...