Monday, April 8, 2013

Why Tech Projects Fail | Avoid Those Costly Cloud Gotchas

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Why Tech Projects Fail: 5 Unspoken Reasons

Depending on which consultancy you ask and what they're ultimately trying to sell you, the failure rate for technology projects is anywhere from 37% to 75%. I especially like the 37% -- not 35, but 37 -- because those extra 2 percentage points give the kind of false precision that suggests authenticity.

If managing technology pays your mortgage, you usually explain away those failures by pointing to your gray world: gray requirements, gray resources, gray planning, gray risks. The only vibrant color in your life is the brilliant hue of overly optimistic project scheduling.

But that's not the whole story. Here are five unspoken reasons IT projects fail as often as they do, drawn from my two decades as an IT manager and executive in the financial services industry.

1. Technology ROI numbers are mostly fiction. The most complex variable in the ROI equation -- one that's usually ignored -- is the cost of the business re-architecture required to consume a proposed technology. If you take away nothing else from this article, know that technology demands business transformation, and that's usually the largest hidden cost.

The rule of thumb for calculating the risk of rolling out new technology is this: the higher the buy-or-build price, the larger and more expensive the required redesign of your business processes.

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