Press seems to have been quite keen on pointing out large failed IT projects recently. Computerworld writes about a failed implementation of large ERP system in Ireland:
Officials have described the PPARS application, which was further along than FISP, as the most complex human resources, time management and payroll system ever implemented in Ireland. After being launched around 1995, the project was budgeted at $10.7 million and was expected to take three years. After 10 years, the expected price tag has rocketed to $180 million.
[…]
The FISP project aimed to build a single financial and materials management system that supports current best practices. The system, expected to cost about $203 million, would replace a mishmash of legacy systems and processes.
Vinnie Mirchandani’s comment on this is that this proves fundamental immaturity of IT industry. That sort of makes me think how many of the high risk ?100M construction projects do finish on time at budget, delivering excatly what was promised? Reading about construction industry (or experiencing them first hand), I wouldn’t be that optimistic.
As often, the problem is identified as software failure, when the real problem was probably business complexity. I’d venture that the fact that civil service has particularly strong culture and its workforce is typically unionised you get quite a difficulty to get a wide-ranging business change. I bet that at the start of the project there was an assumption that there will be a single HR process rolled out across all hospitals, which in the end proved too difficult to make real.
Following the theme, Global Technology has an article summarising last year’s report from Royal Academy of Engineering on large IT projects, which provides much more reasoned explanation of the phenomenon and also some solutions
As for the reason for IT project failures, Professor McDermid believes that there are ‘usually a combination of factors that contribute to a bad end’. They include ‘the complexity of large projects’, as protagonists get ’swamped by complexity, uncertainty, changing requirements, and changes in the organisations themselves’.Indeed, he believes the latter is a major factor, as many failed projects result from a desire to use IT to ‘force organisational change’. ‘They specify an IT system, and expect change to occur, but people can’t live with the changes, so the system fails’.
Research bears him out, as there are abundant studies that demonstrate that successful outcomes in IT projects depend only 25 per cent on the technology component- the rest is entirely attributable to organizational change aspects that are frequently ignored.