Technology success rates are not improving
Technology project success rates have not improved in the past 15 years despite many improvement is technology over all. This lack of improvement has always baffled me!
Over the past 15 years or so, several articles have been written about the failure rate of technology projects. Between 67 and 75% of all technology projects fail, that has always astounded me! How can that be? We know that technology is important. How can we accept such a low success rate?
A Forbes has an article that mentioned that up to 75% of projects can be successful, but 50% of those projects require massive rewrites? Well, one thing that we’ve learned in 2020, is that we can’t tolerate failure with technology anymore. Technology is essential to being able to be successful in the current market economy.
What is the cause of technology failure?
We need technology. But so many times technology fails. How do we finally be successful with technology? And the answer is always with a strategy. If you don’t have a strategy, you are going to fail. We’ve all heard this old saying a failure to plan is a plan to fail. That is absolutely true with technology. Forbes did a market research to find out what was the leading cause of technology failure. they found that 3% of the failures were caused by technology.
Only 3% of all technology projects that failed did so because of technology. 97% failed, because there wasn’t a focus on business and there wasn’t a focus with a clear goal, on what processes were going to be improved.
When I go in and talk to a company and start building a strategy for the success, the last thing I do is talk about the technology, the first thing I do is talk about their core business processes, their support business processes and their management processes. Because we need to know what we’re building, how we’re building it, and how we’re monitoring that process.
The key to success with Technology?
Once we understand what the processes are and how to monitor it, then we can start looking at technology and understanding what things what technology items can really elevate that process. Any technology has been implemented for any other reason than improving your process is going to fail.
I’ve had many times clients call me and say, should I be using artificial intelligence? Should I be using? IoT? Should I be using big data? Should I be using the cloud? And my answer is always the same, never implement technology until you understand your process. Once you understand where those things could fall into the process, we can model out what the process should look like and what it would look like with that new technology and calculate or return of investment, then we can know if we’re applying it in a way that’s valuable to your business.
This sounds funny coming from a technologist, but I never recommend applying technology unless we know exactly that what the business impact is going to be. A lot of times companies come and say, Hey, I’m afraid to apply technology in my company because as soon as I apply it, I might change. technology doesn’t change as much as it evolves. And we can very clearly know when it’s time to apply new technology.
If we look at the calculated return on the investment, and look at the impact of the of the process, because very simply, if we know what the return on the investment is going to be we can determine if it’s time to apply the technology. Never apply technology just because it’s there. Only apply technology because it can elevate your business process.
