One Expert Pegs Yearly Cost of IT Failure At $6.2 Trillion

blognoggle writes "Roger Sessions, a noted author and expert on complexity, developed a model for calculating the total global cost of IT failure. Roger describes his approach in a white paper titled The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity. He concludes that IT failure costs the global economy a staggering $6.2 trillion per year."

Comments

incompetence

[X10]

Does this mean that IT people are generally incompetent? Or is it just the IT managers who are incompetent? Or, just maybe, it's all IT people who don't read /. who are. Hmm..

Re:incompetence

[pnewhook]

So I'm not a programmer because I don't accept crappy buggy code? Get real. I've 20 years of real-time mission critical coding experience; I know what constitutes good code and architecture, and what is bad.

Software developers need to learn they have to ARCHITECT code. You cannot just hop in and start writing code without a plan. It would be the same as trying to build a house without blueprints, just nailing up wood at one of the corners.. It will kind of look like a house when done, but will have lots of problems. Code is the same thing.

Re:incompetence

[sjames]

Many IT people are incompetent. They are hired by incompetent managers who are more interested in keeping salaries down and maintaining a corporate cube farm than they are in hiring good quality people. Very few understand that the best are 10 times more productive than the run of the mill if you stay out of their way. The problem is exacerbated when management refuses to believe that the assembly line is not at all an appropriate analogy for software development.

It doesn't help that HR departments are utterly clueless when it comes to hiring IT. They look for matches on bullet points but don't understand those points well enough to recognize which ones are important or even which are possible. That's where we got positions requiring 5 years experience in Java when it had only been out there for 2 years. That's also where we get nit-picking bullet points that don't recognize equivalent experiences.

Imagine if architects were rejected regardless of other qualifications if they didn't happen to have at least 5 years experience with a particular brand of drafting pencil.

The result of all of that plus the boom and bust cycle is that during the booms, HR will fill positions with any stuffed shirt and during the bust the layoffs fly indiscriminately. Said stuffed shirts then clog the queues with their resumes and make it hard to find the well qualified candidates. It also depresses salaries for the best while inflating them for the barely adequate.

If you want to look a bit higher, you'll find that the stock/financial segment has spent decades rewarding the short sighted and punishing "engineer run" corporations that refuse to sell out the future for the sake of a 10% bump next month. That also contributes to the continued failures in IT. MBAs who happily save a few pennies today by outsourcing to the very lowest bargain basement bidder (who promptly re-assigns their A-team to the next prospect and substitutes with their b-team who just barely know how to turn a PC on) and then suffer losses by the bucket load when it all goes 'mysteriously' wrong.

Does your company lose 10% to IT failure?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The global domestic product is approximately 60 trillion USD. If 6 trillion is lost to IT failure, then on average, every company is losing 10% productivity to IT failures.

This is simply not credible, and this guy should be strung up by his pinkie toes and flogged with ostrich feathers until he admits he eats eggs benedict on Tuesday mornings.

The Cost of Experience?

[Max Romantschuk]

While it's true that many IT project failures are truly spectacularly expensive, many are also a learning experience. We should strive to eliminate failure, of course, but some inefficiency will always be present in any sufficiently complex undertaking.

If one failed project helps a business prevent similar failure in future projects, has the failed project not produced some value after all?

This is more philosophy than anything else, but things are seldom black and white in this world, are they?

Re:Something's wrong with adblock

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Sounds like somebody needs to hack together a new form of adblocker.

Integrating data from social media networks(get your checkbooks ready and form an orderly line, venture capitalists), particularly those, like linkedin that handle professional affiliations; along with influence peddling/lobbying data from the likes of opensecrets, this tool could automatically grade the trustworthiness and cheap-hackticity of a given article's author, saving you the trouble of manually ignoring the astroturf and marketing fluff.

It'd be a lot trickier, and less precise, than just using regex and blocking known-evil domains; but, in principle, it should actually be possible to use "social media" normally a stalwart friend of subhuman marketing scum, as a source of the information necessary to thwart the same in their vile designs...

Re:Asleep at the Switch

[vlm]

To actually quote the dude in entirety instead of one small part:

When thinking about indirect costs, you need to include the costs of replacing the failed system, the disruption costs to your business, the lost revenue because of the failed system, the lost opportunity costs on what that lost revenue could have driven, the costs to your customers, lost market share, and on and on.

You're claiming that his "the lost opportunity costs on what that lost revenue could have driven" is bogus. However, thats only a small part of his otherwise pretty good argument, so overally, not too bad.

Also, at least some times, its pretty easy to calculate a lost cost revenue cost... Imagine you've got a signed contract to deliver product A, yielding a profit, and you fail. You needed that profit to grease the wheels for totally independent project B. Now, instead of using "free" cash, you'll be hitting the line of credit at the bank, which has some very easily measured costs, or you'll be failing project B, which had its own precisely defined profit... That sounds like a "lost opportunity cost on what the lost revenue could have driven".

Who cares as long as some of it comes my way

[tyroneking]

Seriously - this is dumb - IT projects, just like life, will often fail. We know they will and we know why. If it was such a problem then clients and project managers would actually do something about it - but they don't. So in that case all I care about is that I get some of the money - and I work in IT - so I do. Hooray!

Also, failure isn't such a bad thing - my past relationships failed, I didn't regret them (well, ok, I did...) - my latest poem failed to be any good, I didn't regret trying - my last batch of home brew has gone bad (I may still drink it of course) but that's life.

Re:A few reasons ( in my opinion)

[Culture20]

Star Trek style management: Managers who think their crew are Scotty who pulls off a miracle every week. Its never been done, we don't have time to do it right, but its got to work right the first time given not enough resources. Sure it works on Star Trek, its in the script. FYI: I love the Star Trek series, but I also know the difference between fiction and reality.

Geordi: "Yeah, well, I told the captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour."
Scotty: "How long will it really take?"
Geordi: "An hour."
Scotty: "You didn't tell him how long it would really take, did you?"
Geordi: "Of course I did."
Scotty: "Laddie, you got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker!"

Re:BS Rolls downhil

[KDN]

Translated into home building:

1. Owner: I just bought 50 gold plated facuets, put them into the house your renovating.
2. Builder looking at the blueprints for the two bathrooms: where do you want them?
3. Owner: I don't care, just put them in because I paid for them.
4. Builder: how did you pay for them?
5. Owner: oh, I decided that your electrical upgrade is not needed. The guy who installed it, what's his name, Thomas Edison? I'm sure there is plenty of capacity to handle the fifty ton HVAC and my million volt tesla coil. And if not its your fault. Oh yes and I need it in one month, not six. I'm having my daughters wedding reception here.