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Another $1 billion troubled system project

January 11, 2017
Another $1 billion troubled system project

A few years ago, I posted about the Air Force’s abandoned $1 billion effort to consolidate all its many accounting systems. Now it appears the State of California is going through similar difficulties: State officials have failed to remedy problems that have contributed to a two-year delay for a new computer system and cost increases […]

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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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Why Ballmer Failed

August 25, 2013 1 Comment
Why Ballmer Failed

Derek Thompson over at the Atlantic has put together a very useful, brief article outlining what has happened at Microsoft under Steve Ballmer’s watch. Most significant is this graph:   That tells the story in a nutshell, but go read the whole article — it’s worth it.

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Fireflies, conveyor belts, and landfill

March 4, 2009 0 Comments
Fireflies, conveyor belts, and landfill

My newest Baseline column is up, and in it, I talk about technology lifecycles that can cause you grief: Each technology is on its own product lifecycle, which may or may not match with your organization’s business and development lifecycles. In particular, there are certain cycle mismatch patterns that commonly occur in organizations looking to […]

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Coping with the economic downturn

January 20, 2009 0 Comments
Coping with the economic downturn

[Cross-posted from brucefwebster.com] I’m currently writing a series of columns for Baseline on how to deal with frozen or reduced IT budgets due to the current economic troubles. Here are the first two columns: Performing IT Project Triage Pulling the Plug on IT Project Next up: how to deal with personnel issues.  ..bruce..

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