Failed IT Projects Cost Billions: Train wreck in slow motion

Regardless of whether you are developing a new application, website, or implementing a new software system, failures and setbacks occur.  It happens.  It's inevitable.  It costs.  Billions.  This article from the Globe & Mail (Canada) talks in depth about the scale of IT failures and some of the potential "whys" .

Let's lay some groundwork here:

The UK public sector alone spends circa 22.6-billion pounds each year on IT, and some reports suggest that 1.5 billion-pounds have been wasted on failed IT projects since 1997. A 2004 report from the UK Royal Academy of Engineers and the British Computer Society estimated that only 16 per cent of these projects succeed, and confirmed that billions of pounds each year are wasted on them — throughout the EU.

Indeed, statistics suggest that 50 per cent of all IT projects fail, while 40 per cent are late and/or over budget, and ultimately delivered with reduced functionality.

These various controversies have led to a major reform of how the Government in the UK and Ireland handles large scale IT projects, but the jury is definitely out, and public trust in elected officials has visibly eroded.

But lest we get smug here in North America, it is abundantly clear that such wanton waste is not just an EU concern. It is a global pandemic that needs urgent attention. And Canadians have plenty of home- spun examples to call upon.

In the US, the FBI recently disclosed that a post-911 IT project that has cost $170-million (U.S.) to date has been an abject failure, and that they will have to start again. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was quoted in Wired magazine as describing the whole fiasco as "a train wreck in slow motion."

Source: Globe & Mail: GlobeTechnology

You're not going to read any smug "it's never happened to me" lines here.  There are still a few projects I'm sure we all wish we had never started.  Several projects that, although they were eventually completed, were over-budget or somehow short of expectations.  So the question remains, why.