But Alex reminded me of a 2006 Daniel Davies article on the dismal fate of British public sector IT projects. Here’s what I think is the money quote:
This would seem like an unbelievably obvious, basic rule of good practice; that you can have major operational projects or major structural changes, but not both at once. It is, in fact, one of the big principles that they teach you in business school. But in the British public sector, this principle appears to be treated with the most monumental and catastrophic contempt. There was simply no chance that the NHS IT project (or the various Home Office projects, or the various education projects) was going to succeed; failure was written into the specification by the fact that the government chose to ignore the existence of the projects when deciding to have a dozen or more attempts at “radical change”.
No comment, but it’s not just British IT projects which could use this insight. Unfortunately, most big, public sector IT projects tend to take years rather than months and there are few sectors in which you can shut down change that long. So every project that goes on long enough and has to deal with any kind of legislation is always going to have to run a Red Queen’s Race just to keep up with its environment. The same goes for any large IT driven organisation, which these days is every organisation.
What makes things worse is that by and large a lot of the decision makers are IT illiterate and think of computers as just fancy typewriters or databases as just a replacement for their filing cabinets. Not to mention that especially in government, the people who ultimately have to make the decisions are not part of the organisation having to implement them and therefore do not understand the consequences of their decisions for these organisations.