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According to an internal audit, mismanagement of funds and the failure to involve staff IT experts led to the termination of an IBM Watson project at a University of Texas cancer center:
According to a blistering audit by the University of Texas System, the cancer center grossly mismanaged its splashy program with IBM, which started back in 2012. The program aimed to teach Watson how to treat cancer patients and match them to clinical trials. Watson initially met goals and impressed center doctors, but the project hit the rocks as MD Anderson officials snubbed their own IT experts, mishandled about $62 million in funding, and failed to follow basic procedures for overseeing contracts and invoices, the audit concludes.
IBM pulled support for the project back in September of last year. Watson is currently prohibited from being used on patients there, and the fate of MD Anderson's partnership with IBM is in question. MD Anderson is now seeking bids from other contractors who might take IBM's place. Meanwhile, a similar project that IBM started with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York around the same time frame has already wrapped up. It resulted in a commercial product that is currently making its way into hospitals around the world, including in [Jupiter, Florida].
[...] Lastly, auditors found that invoices were paid regardless of whether services were provided, but weren't consistently paid or paid in a timely way. Some fees were suspiciously set at rates just below the amounts that would trigger review and require approval by the Board of Regents. And, MD Anderson paid out money from donations that hadn't actually come through yet—leaving the project with an $11.59 million deficit.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:14PM
The difference is that Government can just demand more money from people at the point of a gun.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:17PM
When a business goes bad, it goes bankrupt, and thereby saves the rest of us from its further poor management.
When government goes bad, it just gets to demand more resources; the problem, of course, was that it just didn't have enough money in the first place, you know, for oversight or something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:56PM
Bullshit. When a business goes bankrupt, somebody buys the assets along with the various workers and the incompetent owner gets a golden parachute.
As far as the government goes, it's your own damn fault for continually voting for incompetent politicians that promise to destroy the government by stocking it with morons and then underpaying the people that are hired because government is automatically wasteful.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:54PM
Let's have anarcho-capitalism everywhere! Then we can give our money to gun-wielding "entrepreneurs."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:08PM
It wouldn't be capitalism anymore. Get it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:32PM
capitalism - an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations
A gun can be the means of exchange of wealth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:59PM
And out here, due process is a bullet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:08PM
Doing so makes you a government; you would no longer be a "private" individual.
Hence, what you imply is NOT capitalism. Get it, yet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:38PM
So cattle rustlers were governments, cartels are governments, the maffia and yukuza are governments.
Oh we get it, you're crazy like a loon!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:55PM
And of course every single bank robber was a government.
I wonder how they arrested those bank robbers. Don't governments have immunity? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:04PM
Those robbers imposed rules of interaction that they concocted on the fly.
They were not engaged in negotiating and then abiding by (including enforcing) contracts to which all of the participants had already agreed up front; fundamentally, in terms of societal interaction, they are no different from warlords or dictators or Uncle Sam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:00PM
They have various jurisdictions, and they base their funding on involuntary interaction.
Guess what? North Korea's government looks nothing like that of the U.S. Neither does some warlord in Somalia, but he and his organization constitute a government nonetheless. Get it, yet?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:17AM
Or a managing team.
Don't tell me CEO-s lose their individual or "private" status.
Or... did you want to say that a "corporate person-hood" is incompatible with capitalism?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:50AM
Or are you trying to build a straw man?
In either case - what does the "that" refer to? There are many noun phrases in that article, it's not obvious which one you are referring to at all. The one in the title? The final one in the summary? The final one in the article? Partnering with a university depeartment doesn't make you governmental, it makes you a provider of services at most. Thousands of companies do this, it's called business. That's what businesses do. It's lucrative. Even I do it, even though I'm inelligible to work for the government (I don't speak the official language to a sufficient level).
You're gibbering.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves