IT failures town hall: Risks of survival [podcast]
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For this installment of the IT failures town hall discussion series, I spoke about failures during these challenging economic times with independent industry analyst Jonathan Yarmis.
As you can see from the slide presentation below, Jonathan and I covered a range of failure-related issues affected by the economy. Although our perspectives are different, which comes across as good-natured debate in the podcast, we agreed on several points:
- Economic tensions have exacerbated built-in conflicts and organizational agendas to the detriment of running successful IT projects.
- IT has an uphill battle fighting low cost, easy-to-deploy solutions brought in by end users. The IT / business divide remains a significant issue, but wise IT departments will make strong efforts to reach across the fence.
- While cloud computing solutions do not offer an IT failure panacea, reduced implementation scope combined with outsourced infrastructure can reduce some failure rates.
- Many organizations make expedient short-term decisions that will come back to cause problems later. Although it's hard to consider medium- or long-term consequences in today's tough environment, avoiding this critical issue will eventually make things worse.
- Fear militates against project success. We discussed this important issue toward the end of the conversation and it's mentioned as a concluding point on slide 13.
Click the slide presentation below to follow along as you listen to the recording:
[Thanks to Vanda Ladeira, Chief Strategist in the Office of the Chief Executive of the UK Parliament (Twitter: @redmamba), for emphasizing the crucial point of fearlessness, during recent conversations about IT strategy and project success.]