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Why government IT projects are so prone to failure or overruns

September 30, 2013 2 Comments
Why government IT projects are so prone to failure or overruns

Joseph Marks over at Government Executive Magazine has an excellent article on the propensity of government IT projects to having significant cost/schedule overruns or to fail altogether. One of the key issues is the frequent lack of authority, power, and accountability precisely because of all the rules, regulations, and procedures in place for acquiring IT […]

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Patterns of failure: how LucasArts fell apart

September 27, 2013 0 Comments
Patterns of failure: how LucasArts fell apart

Over at Kotaku, a Gawker Media web portal that covers computer games (a bigger industry than Hollywood, I might point out), Jason Schreier has an excellent article outlining the fall of LucasArts, once one of the most productive and successful video game companies around, but now no longer in existence. It is worth a careful […]

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$1 billion example of the Thermocline of Truth

September 9, 2013 4 Comments
$1 billion example of the Thermocline of Truth

In a post here last week, I made reference to what I call “the thermocline of truth.” The basic idea is simple: those in the trenches of a large project know how badly it’s going, while those at the top think everything’s fine; the level at which the ‘truth’ stops is somewhere in the middle. As […]

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Entrenchment of bad technology: the London Metropolitan Police Department

September 2, 2013 0 Comments
Entrenchment of bad technology: the London Metropolitan Police Department

Vernor Vinge, in several of his science fiction novels (such as A Fire upon the Deep), posits the existence of  “zones of thought” within the inner portion of our galaxy that place inherent limits on intelligence and technology — the further you get from the galaxy’s center, the greater intelligence and technology is possible. The […]

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The Gartner Hype Cycle (2013)

August 22, 2013 0 Comments
The Gartner Hype Cycle (2013)

Barry Ritholtz, over at the always-worth-reading The Big Picture, posts the latest “hype cycle” from Gartner and where current proposed/emerging/developing technologies stand. I wasn’t familiar with Gartner’s stages of hype (as shown along the bottom of the chart), but they’re very useful. The overall concept meshes well with an article I wrote back in 2009 for Baseline […]

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