Search Is a Major Project: Does Doom Await?
September 22, 2011
Datamation ran a long article called “Why Major IT Projects are More Likely to Fail Than Any Others” informs us of a study published by Oxford University which found that major IT projects are twenty times more likely to fail than other IT projects. On average, these larger projects ran 27 percent over-budget and took 55 percent longer to complete than originally planned. One in six eventually spiral out of control.
According to Silicon.com’s article, “Five ways to stop your IT projects spiralling out of control and overbudget” describes why this is the case and details tips for controlling projects. The article states:
The risk of tech projects going rogue is down to IT being harder to manage than other business disciplines, according to Bent Flyvbjerg, BT professor and founding chair of major program management at Oxford University. ‘Our theory is this is because IT projects are less tangible, they are also more complex,’ he told silicon.com.
Is it possible that a main culprit behind this phenomenal statistic is complexity? Are information technology companies attempting to develop elaborate plans for the newest and the best and aiming too high? I think it’s very likely. Perhaps if developers could simplify their ideas and end the game of out-performing each other, we could easily have more IT projects completed.
Search deployments often become expensive headaches, but it may not just be the peculiarities of search or search vendors, integrators, or staff. The problem may reside in the fact that the complexity of the undertaking is overlooked, ignored, or not understood. Too bad. Some search vendors take the blame for a problem created by a business process, not technology.
When I spoke with Stephen E Arnold, publisher of Beyond Search, he told me:
Software and systems are complex. The environments into which engineers insert these things is complex. Complexity adds to complexity. Costs sky rocket and systems don’t work particularly well. Vendors often take the blame for problems caused by casual, uninformed, or inappropriate business processes used to scope a project and spell out requirements. Search falls victim to these issues just like enterprise resource planning, accounting, and document management systems.
Quite a challenge for those responsible for a large scale project awaits it seems.
Andrea Hayden, September 22, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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One Response to “Search Is a Major Project: Does Doom Await?”
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I believe that the problem is that life is increasingly complex, and that the needs and sophistication of the users are increasingly complex. Applications must now integrate and communicate with many other technologies and devices, and become platforms rather than just applications.