The failure of a effort with the scope of an enterprise-wide project like this in an organization that is clearly "immature" from a project management, technology-management, and IT systems, processes and development standpoint should surprise no one. Never mind achieving enterprise application integration.
Every Fortune 1000 company has hurtled down this obstacle course and has the scars to prove it. It is an expensive journey, but there doesn't seem to be any way around it. As some say, "Pay now or pay later." Multiple iterations of large projects are the norm, not the exception and I believe are an inevitable learning curve that can't be avoided - a rite of passage so to speak. The only disconnect in the FBI's project was thinking that it could be done right the first time at any cost or in any timeframe.
Why? Because half the issues are cultural and derive from the dynamics of the organization which needed to change after 9/11. No vendor or project manager or JAD team can solve for that - they were caught in the middle of a paradigm and culture shift that they had no control over and may not even have been fully aware of or able to articulate and document. The fact that their JAD sessions lasted 6 months is surely proof enough that the organization wasn't ready to talk to IT developers.
Setting aside the lapses in personal competence (e.g. great effort to collect trinkets and souvenirs for scrapbooks while putting a value judgement on valid criticism and calling it "disruptive"), at the end of the day, you can't design what you can't conceive. They didn't know what they didn't know. Now, somewhat older and wiser, perhaps they know quite a bit more, but I doubt they (the FBI organization) know enough to get it right.
One of the "graybeards" in the IEEE article predicts it will be 2010 or 2011. But that will only be the second time. I say it will be more like 2015 for a third try before they will really know with any confidence what they actually knew about the hijackers before 9/11 and have enterprise application systems that are world class and interoperable both within the FBI and externally with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
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The failure of a effort with the scope of an enterprise-wide project like this in an organization that is clearly "immature" from a project management, technology-management, and IT systems, processes and development standpoint should surprise no one. Never mind achieving enterprise application integration.
Every Fortune 1000 company has hurtled down this obstacle course and has the scars to prove it. It is an expensive journey, but there doesn't seem to be any way around it. As some say, "Pay now or pay later." Multiple iterations of large projects are the norm, not the exception and I believe are an inevitable learning curve that can't be avoided - a rite of passage so to speak. The only disconnect in the FBI's project was thinking that it could be done right the first time at any cost or in any timeframe.
Why? Because half the issues are cultural and derive from the dynamics of the organization which needed to change after 9/11. No vendor or project manager or JAD team can solve for that - they were caught in the middle of a paradigm and culture shift that they had no control over and may not even have been fully aware of or able to articulate and document. The fact that their JAD sessions lasted 6 months is surely proof enough that the organization wasn't ready to talk to IT developers.
Setting aside the lapses in personal competence (e.g. great effort to collect trinkets and souvenirs for scrapbooks while putting a value judgement on valid criticism and calling it "disruptive"), at the end of the day, you can't design what you can't conceive. They didn't know what they didn't know. Now, somewhat older and wiser, perhaps they know quite a bit more, but I doubt they (the FBI organization) know enough to get it right.
One of the "graybeards" in the IEEE article predicts it will be 2010 or 2011. But that will only be the second time. I say it will be more like 2015 for a third try before they will really know with any confidence what they actually knew about the hijackers before 9/11 and have enterprise application systems that are world class and interoperable both within the FBI and externally with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.