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| About Information Technology and Strategy Failure |
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| This site makes repeated reference to exceptionally high failure rates for Information Technology and Strategy investments. |
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| High Failure Rates -- Why You Need JAR&A |
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| It is these exceptional failure rates which make it vital for all organizations considering material investment in Information Technology or Strategy to consult with JAR&A to gain a better insight into the factors giving rise to failure and how to overcome them. |
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| Basis of Failure Statistics |
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| What is the basis of these statistics? |
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| Dr James Robertson first became aware of the 70% failure rate of I.T. investments in 1994 while lecturing a group of 150 students on a Master of Business Administration (MBA) program for the Graduate Institute of Management and Technology (GIMT). |
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| During this course he asked the students, mostly representing middle to senior management of major corporations, whether their corporations were satisfied with their I.T. investment and felt that it was delivering value for money. Approximately 70% indicated that this was NOT the case in their organizations. |
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| Subsequently this statistic has been reported at dozens of conferences internationally and the only comment that has been received is that the failure rate is closer to 90% than 70%. |
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| At about the same time, the then Chief Executive Officer of Computer Associates was widely quoted as having stated that of a total US$3 Trillion invested in I.T. since it's inception, US$2 Trillion had never worked at all. |
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| Other, more recent surveys have reported that only 10% of I.T. investments really deliver on the design requirements. |
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| Bottom Line -- Only 10% Deliver |
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| The bottom line is simple -- 70% of I.T. investments never see the light of day, that is, they never deliver anything that works -- and 90% fail to meet the requirements set at the time the investment was initiated. In other words, only 10% of I.T. investments truly deliver. |
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| Professor Malcolm MacDonald, Peter Laburn and others reported as early as 1994 that about 90% of Strategy projects failed and these statistics have been widely reported over the years. |
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| Other indications are that 70% of "Business Process Reengineering" projects fail. |
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| Statistics Widely Accepted and Acknowledged |
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| These various statistics have been widely reported by Dr James Robertson in the period 1994 to 2002 and have never been challenged, with the exception of occasional individuals who have asserted that the situation is worse than these statistics indicate. |
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| The reality is clearly that the performance of Information Technology, Strategy and Business Process Optimization projects all leave very much to be desired. |
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| Corporate Collapse is Becoming More Frequent |
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| Furthermore, recent experience indicates that failure of major I.T. projects is increasingly directly or indirectly responsible for corporate failures. For example, a R26 million I.T. project termination a few years ago triggered collapse of a major medical aid and was followed a year later by the collapse of the holding company. |
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| A combination of damage resulting from the I.T. failure and flawed strategic planning appears to be primarily responsible for the demise of a corporation that was reportedly turning over approximately R2 billion per annum. |
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| Since 1994 Dr Robertson has been formally collecting information relating to I.T. and Strategy Project failure and cataloguing the factors that give rise to failure. |
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| Overcoming These Factors -- Achieving Success |
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| Through this process he has come to understand how to overcome the factors giving rise to failure and this has given rise to the approach which we refer to as "Designing for Success by Engineering Against Failure". |
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