projects

62 percent of IT projects fail. Why?

CIO.com cites a Dynamic Markets survey of 800 IT managers, reporting that 62 percent of IT projects fail to meet their schedules. Other data:

49 percent suffered budget overruns 47 percent had higher-than-expected maintenance costs, and 41 percent failed to deliver the expected business value and ROI

This wouldn't be so bad, CIO.com notes, if it weren't for the fact that the numbers haven't appreciably improved over the past decade. In some cases, they've gotten worse.

Why? Why do 25 percent of all IT projects get canceled before completion? CIO.com cites two reasons:… Read more

Kiss Microsoft Project goodbye

If you use Microsoft Project, you might want to seriously consider three alternatives that run completely on the Web. In addition to supporting more contemporary features right now, and getting updated with even newer gadgets more frequently than Microsoft can muster, these products, being completely Web-based, offer much more robust collaboration tools.

First up: Liquid Planner. We saw this product at Demo 2008 but it will be on stage again at the Under the Radar conference that I'm moderating on Thursday. This tool's special sauce is its embrace of uncertainty. Users can put in best-case and worst-case estimates … Read more

Exposed to military chemical and biological warfare tests, they walk among us

Thousands of people who may have been exposed to chemical or biological agents during military tests remain unaccounted for, and the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs have given up on tracking them down, according to a new report.

Some of the tests were conducted as part of a weapons testing program known as "Project 112." In others (click here for PDF), individuals were intentionally exposed to hazardous substances such as blister, nerve, and biological agents as well as LSD and PCP, according to a Government Accounting Office report (PDF).

Any veterans who believe they have sustained … Read more

Open source and the future of vendor-free IT

In reading through IDC's excellent report, "2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption," analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing observation in open-source software adoption. He apparently believes it is a weakness of the current open-source landscape, but I believe it is a strength.

The observation? That IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies.

Matt writes:

The shocking result here is the complete dearth of service providers that are currently being tapped for installation, training, and other services associated with open source software, regardless of where in the software stack that software sits. Less than 1% of the projects have attendant services sourced from service providers.… Read more

Google: The new Sourceforge?

Sourceforge boasts 169,282 registered projects. The actual number of active projects may be as low as 15,000. This is still an impressive number, but it may not be enough to stave off the Google threat.

Just two years after Google kicked off project hosting on its Google Code site, Google is reporting that it now hosts over 80,000 projects. Given how new it is (and how infrequently Sourceforge prunes its projects, if at all), it may well be that Google now has more active projects hosted on its Google Code site than Sourceforge.

The real question, of … Read more

Demo goes green

Demo is trying to green itself and is even considering a green-only event for start-ups in the future. This time, though, there are two companies that hope to use tech to evoke environmental change.

Green Plug makes universal plugs for consumer electronics. Taking a duffel bag full of tangled cords and power adapters and dumping them on the Demo presentation stage, founder and Chief Executive Frank Paniagua declared, "The power model is broken, and we have to fix it." (See CNET's First Look video.)

His solution is Green Plug, a three-port DC hub that will recognize any … Read more

Picture is fading for projection TVs

LAS VEGAS--Samsung has been one of the big backers of rear-projection TVs, but its interest is waning.

"Over time, that (projection TV) will probably go away," S.I. Lee, Samsung's senior vice president of marketing for digital media, said at the Consumer Electronics Show here.

That could be a death knell for the format. Other companies, most notably Hitachi and Sony, have already killed their projection TV lines.

"We were interested in the business until the end of last year," said Makato Ebata, CEO of the consumer business group at Hitachi.

Projection TVs, which blast … Read more

Pioneer concept plasmas promise 'absolute' blacks

Pioneer consistently makes some of the best plasmas on the market, such as our current Editors' Choice PDP-5080HD plasma, and today it demonstrated two new "Project Kuro" technology concepts that are among the most exciting displays shown by anyone at CES. Unfortunately, neither will make it to market in 2008.

The first, designated the "Extreme Contrast Concept" plasma, is said to be capable of producing an "absolute black with no measurable light emitting from the television." The ability to produce a dark shade of black is one of the most important ingredients in picture quality.… Read more

The UK has wasted over $4 billion on failed IT projects since 2000

The Guardian is reporting that the United Kingdom government has flushed over ?2 billion (More than US$4 billion) since 2000 on failed IT projects. IT projects fail. It's a fact of life. It would be nice if the UK government weren't squandering so much with so few vendors, and if all the waste weren't locked up in proprietary software, and if it were mitigating its IT failure risk with open-source software.

Indeed, could there be a correlation to the UK government's fetish with Microsoft and seven other proprietary vendors? In other words, putting all of its IT eggs in just a few proprietary baskets doesn't seem to be working for the UK. Are the projects failing, in part, because the government is attempting to use proprietary, unwieldy software?

Or is it just a matter of incompetence? The Guardian writes:

The failure of the multimillion-pound police site marks the latest chapter in the government's litany of botched IT projects, with several costly schemes biting the dust. Blunders overseen by Downing Street have included the much-derided ?486m computer upgrade at the Child Support Agency (CSA), which collapsed and forced a ?1bn claims write-off, and an adult learning programme that was subjected to extensive fraud.… Read more