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PROJECT FAILURES: CONTINUING CHALLENGES FOR SUSTAINABLE INFORMATION SYSTEMS P. Loucopoulos K. Lyytinen K. Liu T. Gilb L.A. Maciaszek The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, pl@co.umist.ac.uk Case Western Reserve University Cleveland , U.S.A. kjl13@cwru.edu University of Reading, Reading, U.K. k.liu@reading.ac.uk Gilb International Consulting and Training, Tom@Gilb.com Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, leszek@ics.mq.edu.au Abstract: Much has been written and many discussions have taken place on the causes and cures of IT projects. This introspection is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on as long as industrial size IT systems became into being. The continuing reliance of businesses, government and society on such systems coupled to the realisation that only a little progress has been made in the last 20-30 years in delivering effective and efficient systems are sufficient motivations for continuing this debate. This paper is the product of such a public debate by the authors during the 2004 International Conference on Enterprise Information System. The paper focuses on four topics: ecological complexity, product complexity, project management and education. 1 INTRODUCTION Information technology investments have always been risky and their mortality rates have in the long term been above the average in any industry. Research into system development in general and software engineering in particular has, over the years, suggested a plethora of approaches to address this challenge (Fitzerald, 1996) and many of them have been shown to improve software development capability. Improved technological approaches in a number of fields such as requirements engineering (Bubenko, 1995; Loucopoulos et al., 1995), conceptual modelling (Doyle et al., 1993; Yu et al., 1994), and design paradigms (Carroll, 2002; Potts, 1996) represent very significant responses of researchers and practitioners in ameliorating this situation. A recent study (The-Standish-Group, 2003) revealed that when compared to a similar study carried out in 1995, the number of failed projects has decreased, as has the cost overruns but projects continue to be delivered late and over 50% of them fail to meet their initial objectives The UK National Audit Office in its report of 19 th January 2004 on Ministry of Defence Major Projects stated that “… total current forecast costs are £51.9 billion, an increase of £3.1 billion in the last year and some six per cent over approval.” and that “….projects have slipped an average of 18 months beyond their expected delivery dates” (National-Audit-Office, 2004). I. Seruca et al. (eds.), Enterprise Information Systems VI, © 2006 S pringer. Printed in the Netherlands. 1 1–8. This report refers to projects whose complexity and dynamism far exceeds the systems of previous times. A key question therefore is that if we were unsuccessful in delivering yesterday’s systems what chance is there for developing tomorrow’s systems that are intended to serve a whole raft of complex requirements? Consider the following examples. GM’s next generation car will involve over 100 million lines of code and must interface not only with the car control systems (brakes, emission control etc) but also with external entertainment systems, telecommunication systems, and even business applications. Boeing’s new 7E7 is not only innovative in its use of material technologies which make it the lightest commercial jet in the world but deals with the challenge of deploying new software platforms that enable large scale integration of design information and production information along the supply chain. Clearly, the main roots and challenges related to overcoming system development risks of such scale are now quite different than they were 10 or 20 years ago. Naturally, there are many issues that could be examined in a discussion paper. Whilst recognising that these are not the only issues of concern, this paper focuses its attention on four themes: �� Ecological complexity �� Product complexity �� Project management and �� Education Ecological complexity is about poorly understood and unpredictable interactions with the system
2 ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS VI development environment and the system development task and is discussed in section 2. Ecological complexity interacts with and influences other levels of complexity called product complexity. Product complexity is normally measured by LOC measures, function points or the number of interacting system components and its theme is taken up in terms of conceptual framework in section 3. The issue of project management is approached from an empirical perspective and is discussed in section 4, in terms of defining the project requirements right and then establishing a set of design actions to meet these requirements. Educating the developers and project managers of the future, who have to deal with an increasingly challenging set of demands in a complex and fast changing environment, is the topic of section 5. 2 ECOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY The main issue in very large scale development efforts is in understanding how strategies that drive technological choices -i.e. functional requirements, data standards, platform standards, issues of interoperability- relate to organizational control strategies i.e. who has the right to decide and control such functional requirements, data definitions etc., and how the business value of such decisions will be distributed within the industrial network. In many cases the challenge that developers face is that they cannot assume a centralized control and thereby cannot have the required capability alone to coordinate technological and business development that is necessary to build up a workable business solution. Most development situations involve stakeholders that cannot be controlled (clients in ebusiness, suppliers in Boeing, telecommunication companies in case of GM, etc) and who may resist specific ways to coordinate and manage system architectures and resulting solutions. Any development effort of a large scale sociotechnical system (IT investment) within any industry can be configured within two dimensions: (a) the structure of control for information technologies, and (b) the structure of control for human/organization actors. On the information technologies dimension, the structure of control can be configured either as a centralized (centralized databases, Enterprise Resource Planning Systems) or distributed structure (web-based services). Likewise, the human/organization actors dimension can also be configured as a centralized structure, with vertical control systems around dominant industry actors (like Boeing in aerospace industry or the Big Three in auto manufacturing) or a distributed structure without such dominant actors (like 2 nd and 3 rd tier suppliers of manufacturing industries). A doubly distributed socio-technical system is conceived as one in which both the information technologies and the human /organizational actors are distributed, and architectural control is lax. Successful application of information technology to date has fallen outside the boundaries of this type of doubly distributed system. In all three other areas the success has been less successful than originally imagined (e.g. the difficulty in implementing and organizing market based systems in car industry like Covisint). The original industrial application of information technology began with centralized IT architectures in vertically integrated organizational systems inside organizations. In recent years, organizations have developed various forms of IT systems with centralized control that support distributed organizational designs. Prominent examples of such applications include centralized knowledge repositories or ERP systems based on centralized database for the entire enterprise. As organizations have attempted to apply the centralized IT architecture beyond the traditional boundary of the firm, they have faced numerous organizational and technical challenges. For example, many of the small 2 nd and 3 rd tier suppliers in the aerospace and automotive industries are still not connected to the centralized ERP systems that were implemented by the dominant players in the industry. Similarly, distributed information technology systems can effectively serve centralized organizations, as web servers and IBM’s ambitious plans for ‘On Demand’ service attest. If organizations attempt to seek to apply this distributed computing model into distributed organizational structures, however, it will require reconfiguration of organizational systems and control around powerful players outside the organization in order to effectively integrate different IT systems and related business processes. This presents an unprecedented challenge for innovation and organizational change, because knowledge is embedded in local work practices and professional communities, but it must be coordinated across a larger industrial system. Reconfiguring such distributed organizing forms into a centralized system is difficult and in most cases will fail as within the current power system it may be institutionally impossible. In a doubly distributed (DD) system in particular we do not have many examples of success. Yet, this doubly distributed quadrant will arguably be the next frontier of information technology innovations
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Page 13: Invited Papers
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52 ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS V
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ASSESSING EFFORT PREDICTION MODELS
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ORGANIZATIONAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL CR
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ASAP Processes W Project Kickoff A
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since it means changing the relevan
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ACME-DB: AN ADAPTIVE CACHING MECHAN
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ACME-DB: AN ADAPTIVE CACHING MECHAN
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Hit Rate (%) ACME-DB: AN ADAPTIVE C
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5.3.6 Effect on all Policies by Int
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to t
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This paper describes the data sampl
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The major limit A of the operation
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RELATIONAL SAMPLING FOR DATA QUALIT
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TOWARDS DESIGN RATIONALES OF SOFTWA
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((Brown et al., 1998), pp. 159-190,
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sive data filtering, presentation (
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• implementation changes in servi
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MEMORY MANAGEMENT FOR LARGE SCALE D
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Data Rate [bytes/sec] 1600000 14000
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E.g., DV Camcorder Camera Packets (
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Procedure CheckOptimal (n rs 1 ...n
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MEMORY MANAGEMENT FOR LARGE SCALE D
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PART 2 Artificial Intelligence and
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110 ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
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DYNAMIC MULTI-AGENT BASED VARIETY F
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AN EXPERIENCE IN MANAGEMENT OF IMPR
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ANALYSIS AND RE-ENGINEERING OF WEB
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Module p0 Customer Itinerary Send I
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departments: the marketing dept. se
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• An acyclic module M is usable,
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BALANCING STAKEHOLDER’S PREFERENC
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The scenarios will provide an abstr
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BALANCING STAKEHOLDER'S PREFERENCES
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BALANCING STAKEHOLDER'S PREFERENCES
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A POLYMORPHIC CONTEXT FRAME TO SUPP
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A POLYMORPHIC CONTE XT FRAME TO SUP
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FEATURE MATCHING IN MODEL-BASED SOF
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combination of solution domains - a
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• features for all the concepts:
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Existence In both steps it is possi
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matching strategies are maximal, mi
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TOWARDS A META MODEL FOR DESCRIBING
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elementary message (ae-message) can
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problems on a pragmatic level, whic
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TOWARDS A META MODEL FOR DESCRIBING
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INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEMS USING A
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INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEMS USING A
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(k� 1) (k) (k�1) (k) p � w
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Table 5: Performance Comparison of
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A USER-CENTERED METHODOLOGY TO GENE
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carries out the second phase of the
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1 1 1 1 2 PROCESS STORE ENTITY EDGE
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constraints rules. KOGGE (Ebert et
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PART 4 Software Agents and Internet
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CABA 2 L A BLISS PREDICTIVE COMPOSI
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y disables evidencing severe mental
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Figure 4: Symbols emission in DAR-H
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they evidence a generalization erro
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A METHODOLOGY FOR INTERFACE DESIGN
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and mobility loss coupled with redu
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Tradeoff: The default input is poss
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Sessions on the VABS which are held
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A CONTACT RECOMMENDER SYSTEM FOR A
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A CONTACT RECOMMENDER SYSTEM FOR A
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- "Going to the sources". The user
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Here are the matrix W and P for our
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EMOTION SYNTHESIS IN VIRTUAL ENVIRO
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theme turns out to be surprisingly
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6 FROM FEATURES TO SYMBOLS 6.1 Face
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sions are described by different em
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Electronic Imaging 2000 Conference
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to the accessibility problem for th
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Figure 3: Hierarchical View of the
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4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK On th
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PERSONALISED RESOURCE DISCOVERY SEA
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profile, the user defines his curre
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Abdelkafi, N. .....................
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