80% Failure Rate
Tuesday: March 11, 2008 6:29 AM
Recently, CIO magazine published an article on Collaborative and Social Software. One comment made me think a new was that 80% of implementations fail. I think I am going to disagree with that statement by adding my experience. Only about 40% of actual implementations fail but an astonishing 95% fail to succeed. As I have commented before, there is a big difference between not failing and succeeding. That being said, why does this happen? We in Information Technology have over 30-40 years experience in deploying technologies and applications. Why would be have such a high degree of failure? Perhaps the answer it we have been so successful and we continue to apply our old rules and definitions of success. The reason these application don't succeed is that the majority of implementations don't focus on succeeding but rather they focus on not failing. I like to use the terms "Components of Failure" vs. Components of Success.
Component of Failure
- Hardware
- Software
- Features
- Functionality
- Infrastructure
- Vendor
- Development
- Big Bang Delivery
Components of Success
Quantity of Information
Quantity of Objects
Level of Usage
Degree of Reuse
Number of Business Processes
Business Value
Speed of Delivery
Cost Reductions
Evolving Value Add
Customer Service
Which of these do you send the majority of your time? If we were honest, we would realize that we do indeed spend the majority of our time, energy, and resources on the commodities of failure. Yes, I changed the word from components to commodities. Why? Because I can get the majority of those items, if not all, for $20.00 a month. All of those items listed have become commodities. The shift has already occurred, a shift from IT delivering commodities to delivering the customer experience.
Recently, CIO magazine published an article on Collaborative and Social Software. One comment made me think a new was that 80% of implementations fail. I think I am going to disagree with that statement by adding my experience. Only about 40% of actual implementations fail but an astonishing 95% fail to succeed. As I have commented before, there is a big difference between not failing and succeeding. That being said, why does this happen? We in Information Technology have over 30-40 years experience in deploying technologies and applications. Why would be have such a high degree of failure? Perhaps the answer it we have been so successful and we continue to apply our old rules and definitions of success. The reason these application don't succeed is that the majority of implementations don't focus on succeeding but rather they focus on not failing. I like to use the terms "Components of Failure" vs. Components of Success.
Component of Failure
- Hardware
- Software
- Features
- Functionality
- Infrastructure
- Vendor
- Development
- Big Bang Delivery
Components of Success
Which of these do you send the majority of your time? If we were honest, we would realize that we do indeed spend the majority of our time, energy, and resources on the commodities of failure. Yes, I changed the word from components to commodities. Why? Because I can get the majority of those items, if not all, for $20.00 a month. All of those items listed have become commodities. The shift has already occurred, a shift from IT delivering commodities to delivering the customer experience.
Comments (1)
I'd submit that failure is largely attributable to ignoring the "culture change factor". There are a million pieces of software that can make companies better. But few examine the root cause of why they want to change...and almost none seem to grasp that culture change doesn't happen with the solution "goes live."
I've also found a majority of firms don't know the proper questions to ask sales people to really cut through the web of fluff.
The result: A fluffy deployment.
Posted by: Doug Mitchell on March 18, 2008 10:43