NCC Members have free access to this Guideline on the Principia website.

When it comes to finding a scapegoat for the failure of businesses and enterprises to achieve real benefits from IT, one of the most popular candidates is always the lack of integration between different systems. At the end of October 2000, the UK Inland Revenue confessed that it had closed the files on over a million people because information had been lost during the transfer of data in April 2000 from the Benefits Agency's computers to its own. According to one news report, 'the computers couldn't talk to each other'.