Complex inferiority

Why RoboCop is the perfect analogy for every failed digital project. By Nick Clarkson

I finally got round to watching the RoboCop remake. Drawn to it by my love of the original. Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987) was a brutal masterpiece. Needless to say, the remake wasn’t. However, either by chance or by design, the plot perfectly illustrated how pointlessly ambitious technical projects, designed by non-technical people, have a tendency to fail spectacularly.

If you think marketing solves the world’s problems, you’re either drunk or in denial.

Omnicorp’s (OCP) credo is to keep America safe and free from dicks. Though in reality they just want to sell more robots with America’s safety merely a byproduct. OCP, like many others, have made the classic mistake of trying to solve the first problem by way of the second. Improvements in the economy, healthcare and welfare are much better solutions to America’s long term safety than them selling robots. If OCP could admit to themselves that they are a cynical faceless behemoth tasked with appeasing their investors they could have probably come up with something more creative and less complex.

Adding flawed elements to a successful product will compromise it.

Here in lies the crux of the problem. The addition of biotech to win the hearts and minds of the American public has a sound rationale. However, the whole point of developing the robot army in the first place was to remove the weakness of the human element. The fix: switch off the human element. So what the project should have been was ‘give a robot a face’ a far simpler less expensive challenge, granted there’s less of a story to tell, but the former didn’t have desired result either.

Comments like “Make him more tactical… let’s go with black” 2.6 billion dollars into a project are tantamount to “make the logo bigger!”.

When you’ve been on that sort of journey, no one needs that criticism. “Our finest minds have just spent months painstakingly welding together man and machine and all you can say is you don’t like the colour”. Just put a man in a suit and stop wasting everyone’s time.

Never upload a large untested database into the brain of your product moments before a live demo.

Are you insane!? Why would you do that? They weren’t even demoing that feature. Here’s an insanity wolf:

So, in fact, what OCP actually needed was either a man in a suit or a robot with a face. Either of these may have been enough to convince the American public that robots are ok. In fact this process of anthropisation is already in use today. Its why teeth are painted on fighter planes or Henry vacuum cleaners have eyes and http://www.reddit.com/r/Pareidolia has over 80,000 subscribers. But instead, on the whim of an uninformed chief executive, who obviously didn’t understand the technical challenge, they ended up with a pointlessly huge undertaking that was under spec’d over hyped which ultimately ended in disaster. OCP should have employed a decent PM, kept the marketing team at arms length, mapped their impacts, documented their objectives and iterated with prototypes. And, at least, variant tested them with squeaky voices. I would have bought that for a dollar.

Further reading:

http://www.thegeektwins.com/2014/01/25-things-you-didnt-know-about-robocop.html

Nick Clarkson is Head Of Technology at Goram & Vincent, Bristol. You can follow him on Twitter here.