Usually, we’re all so focused on the good stuff we want to do, it’s hard to step back and consider when and why Information Technology projects go wrong. While success rates vary by project size, company size, project nature and so on, technology researchers at Gartner still figure that about half of corporate technology initiatives fail. Pretty scary, if you aren’t familiar with these statistics.
Luckily, there are folks like Michael Krigsman who pay attention. Michael writes the ZDNet blog on “IT Project Failures,” and you can follow it at
http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures .
Michael and Lisbeth Shaw, friends of mine from Boston, founded Asuret (
asuret.com ) to provide tools and consulting services to increase technology project success rates. With fellow zdnet blogger Paul Greenberg, Michael recently organized a virtual town meeting of technology strategists which I was fortunate enough to take part in. (Check out Paul Greenberg’s book and articles on CRM--customer/contact relationship management--at
http://blogs.zdnet.com/crm/ and
http://the56group.typepad.com/ )
The experience of those in the discussion confirmed Paul’s statistics about corporate CRM projects. The big theme, cultural and collaboration issues predominate over direct technical or formal project management issues as sources of CRM project failure. Implementation of a new system may succeed on its own terms and still fail when users vote with their feet and fail to embrace it. They keep using their private Excel spreadsheets or personal email lists instead of new systems. This is important to think about when day in and day out, we may instead worry about the pace of technology innovation, how hard it is to get the latest and greatest things to work as expected and so on. These are all true, yet its the social and cultural factors which have the highest risk.
Insufficiently involving users from the beginning appears, both in statistics and in experience on the call, as a critical factor when a technically successful project still winds up abandoned or drastically recast. If not involved from the beginning, users won’t bother later on. While this may seem a truism, in my own experience, you may think you are involving users at the right level and to the right degree only to discover months later that you need to go back.
Smaller projects and organizations have limited budgets and limited staff time for concentrated planning. The danger here, which apparently affects large technology projects just as much, is that management focuses on choosing features and functions and selecting a vendor ahead of an effective, well understood, and widely accepted strategy.
Those that know me, know I like to consider where for profit and nonprofit technology planning issues converge and can benefit from each other and where they diverge. In the nonprofit world, we may see technology implementations responding to tight grant funding cycles and too quickly focusing in on formal RFP processes. These pressures may be the particular reason behind inadequate work on culture and strategy despite nonprofit emphasis on them in general.
The Asuret town hall provided a great opportunity to step back and consider these issues with folks from around the country working on pretty diverse projects. To follow the discussion on your own, check out the blogs mentioned above and resources on the Asuret site, which I hope to comment on in a follow up article.
