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- Transparent Failure
- Recently, major hosting provider, 365 Main, suffered a significant outage, which affected a number of high-profile websites.As readers of this blog know, IT-related failures are commonplace. What's less common, however, is transparent and detailed disclosure regarding the failure situation and its causes.365 Main has posted a detailed analysis of the...
- Tags: Project success, Project failures
- Blog posts 2007-08-01
- Wisconsin's Apologist for IT Failure
- In recent times, Wisconsin has experienced major IT meltdowns, prompting the State Auditor to release a report recommending various IT reforms. Wisconsin's state legislature also appointed a special task force to review failing IT projects, suggesting the state genuinely takes IT failures seriously. I find these steps to be...
- Tags: Project failures, Government projects
- Blog posts 2007-08-01
- Another UK Health Project Dies
- The UK National Health Service is cancelling an IT-related contract due to problems with the vendor. From an article on silicon.com:The move was taken when it became clear that Atos Healthcare - part of IT services company Atos Origin - was not in a position to provide the services to...
- Tags: Project failures
- Blog posts 2007-07-26
- SOA: Future Failure and Technobabble Gibberish
- IT-director.com has an editorial stating 90% of SOA projects are failing in a significant manner:The problem is that for every successful SOA implementation, there seems to be ten that are providing few of the desired benefits. Many of these failures are down to poor understanding of the underlying principles of...
- Tags: SOA, Project failures
- Blog posts 2007-07-25
- State of Failure in Wisconsin
- Wisconsin seems to be the land of IT project failures. Last April, the state released a report describing broad project failures running through the state government. As a response to so many IT failures, the Wisconsin state legislature formed a special task force to examine the problems. Now, the Wisconsin...
- Tags: Project failures, Government projects
- Blog posts 2007-07-22
- Netsuite: Future Failure?
- Netsuite is a software as a service SaaS vendor offering a variety of business, accounting, and CRM applications over the Internet. Happily for Netsuite, they have filed to go public, as described in this analysis by Jason Wood. Less exciting for Netsuites customers is the news that the company admits...
- Tags: Project failures, IT issues
- Blog posts 2007-07-12
- "Every Problem Imaginable"
- Twenty years ago, the Tennessee state government built a 70,000 square-foot data center in a location that now appears to have a few problems. What kind of problems, you ask? Well, heres what Computerworld has to say on the matter:The state located its data center on top of unstable, jiggly...
- Tags: Project failures, Government projects
- Blog posts 2007-07-12
- Wisconsin Fights Failure
- The Wisconsin state legislature has created a special group to study IT project cost overruns, called The Speaker’s Task Force on Failed Information Technology Projects. So far, they have scheduled monthly meetings running through August. If these meetings stop in August, then little will be accomplished. On the other...
- Tags: Project failures, Government projects
- Blog posts 2007-07-11
- Mid-Market ERP: "Soap Operas of the IT Industry"
- SearchCIO sponsored development of a white paper, called As the World Turns: CIOs and their ERP Dramas registration required. It describes the risks. rewards, and failures of ERP implementations, based on the result of a survey conducted by the author. Check it out: Enterprise Resource Planning ERP systems are the...
- Tags: Project strategy, Project failures, CIO issues
- Blog posts 2007-06-15
- Failed Aspirations at Project Aspire
- According to the Tampa Bay Business Journal, Floridas Project Aspire has been stopped in mid-track. From the article:A top Florida official has suspended work on Project Aspire, a proposed financial management system for state government. Alex Sink, the states chief financial officer, said in a release that the project was...
- Tags: Project failures, Implementation, Government projects
- Blog posts 2007-05-21
- Ten IT Project Pitfalls
- Baseline Magazine published an article called Top 10 Project Pitfalls You Can Avoid. This list is hardy definitive, but does describe a bunch of good points:A projects scope is too monolithic and gargantuan.Processes and technology arent synched up.Poor data quality leads to increased costs.A project is slowed down because it...
- Tags: Project failures
- Blog posts 2007-01-02
- Digg Spikes Its Vote
- By now, most everyone has heard about Digg, the popular social networking news site. Digg users vote for news stories, hoping to elevate their favorites to front page status. Given the large number of readers, and the web traffic generated by front page stories, there is enormous competition to get...
- Tags: Project failures
- Blog posts 2006-12-22
- Greed, Arrogance, Inexperience, and Stupidity
- Greed, arrogance, inexperience, and stupidity are the essential quartet driving many IT project failures. Bring this set of factors together, and failure is practically inevitable. All too often, vendors and customers angle to get as much as possible out of each other, ignoring the fact that fairness and mutual respect...
- Tags: Vendor relationships, Project failures
- Blog posts 2006-12-21
- "IT Chiefs Told to Just Say No"
- IT Week ran a story saying that “IT managers should learn to prioritise in order to avoid failing projects.†The piece adds:IT directors must learn to say no to unreasonable or unviable requests from business executives if they are ever to tackle IT project’s chronically high failure rate.â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"-Speaking at a...
- Tags: Project failures, IT issues
- Blog posts 2006-12-11
- SOA Web Services: Failures on the Horizon
- In a post entitled “The Law of Unintended Consequences,†Geva Perry references an article from InformationWeek describing project failures in the realm of service-oriented architecture SOA and Web services.Geva puts it really well:In a recent InformationWeek survey, 24% of respondents from large corporations said their SOA projects “fell short of...
- Tags: Project failures
- Blog posts 2006-12-08
- Eight Causes of IT Project Failure
- Recently, I blogged about an excellent report, released by the UK National Audit Office, on the subject of IT project failures. That report examined 24 IT projects, to draw conclusions about the causes of both project success and failure. While the reports primary focus is on project success factors, it...
- Tags: Project failures, Government projects
- Blog posts 2006-12-07
- Government Report: UK IT Projects Still Failing
- Back in the 2001 time frame, the Office of Government Commerce National Audit Office in the UK established a program for avoiding large-scale IT failures. The program, called the Gateway Process, established a series of evaluation milestones, or gates, against which a project must be reviewed over its lifecycle. The...
- Tags: Project failures, Government projects
- Blog posts 2006-12-04
- Airbus Crashes from Incompatible Software
- Buying the wrong software can significantly affect the health of even the largest company. If you dont believe me, just ask Christian Streiff, former CEO of Airbus. He was recently replaced due to delays on the companys new flagship plane, stemming from a...
- Tags: Project failures
- Blog posts 2006-10-23
- Five Signs of a Doomed Project
- Dare Obasanjo, blogger, Microsoft employee, and son of the president of Nigeria seriously, has assembled a list of five signals that indicate a project may fail: After being at Microsoft for five years, Ive now begun to see the signs that a project is likely to crash and burn...
- Tags: Project failures
- Blog posts 2006-10-19
- Poll: If the Walls Could Talk...
- InformationWeek ran a poll in which 70% of the respondents claimed to have seen a multimillion-dollar IT project failure. Here’s the link, and below you can see an image of the results. Note that this poll is dynamic â€" the results you see when you click the link may be...
- Tags: Project failures
- Blog posts 2006-10-17
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