Ktn

This past week on the Information Systems course I’m taking as part of the Master’s degree, I mentioned the one article I read last year that I used as example of a failure when trying to integrate Information Systems in an organization. I promised to send my colleagues the reference of it, so here it is: Prescription for an I.T. Disaster? Start with the first link there, “A Bold Vision”, then from there onwards all of the pages are easy to follow.

Next time Bill Gates tries to convince someone that life’s so beautiful with technology, and more with Windows, you better think about it twice, right? He’ll sell you only CALs of some products but won’t take part of any system integration. Brilliant, isn’t it? Even if the project fails as in the above case, he wins.

Oh, and also wanted to mention that in June’s issue of Communications of the ACM there was an article titled ‘Time to rethink health care and ICT?’ where the authors analyzed the effort and provided some suggestions to allow the project to succeed.

One last thing I wanted to point out is also something that the author of ‘The business of software’ article, in the same Communications of the ACM issue, mentions that 80% of software projects fail to meet their goals; a bit different and certainly more current than the information presented in the “Sistemas de Información Gerencial” book that says that the percentage of big Information Systems projects have a failure rate of 50 to 75%.