Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
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This issue of CBTJ addresses the tactical, operational, strategic, and human reasons that allow technology projects to fail and offers guidance and solutions to mitigate the possibility of failure.
Research establishing a link between analytics and business performance remains in a nascent stage, but the popular press is rife with examples of firms predicting the viewing and shopping habits of individuals, providing personalized healthcare-related services, and harnessing real-time agricultural data to increase productivity and efficiency. Nevertheless, when defined as the use of advanced mathematics to identify, explain, or predict patterns in data to improve confidence in business decision making to create value, the majority of analytics projects fail to deliver or have low success rates. This Advisor explores some of the reasons for that failure.
The biggest challenge organizations face while starting an Agile transformation is not the learning, but the unlearning. This Advisor focuses on Agile anti-patterns around roles, events, artifacts, and overall cultural mindset.
Technology projects continue to fail at an astounding rate, and the number and cost of these failures are stunning. The contributors to this issue of CBTJ refuse to give up and refuse to accept the notion that failure is a feature.
Agility initiates and accepts changes to business processes, and artificial intelligence (AI) further enables agility by providing timely updates on the status of a business to facilitate decision making. This Advisor explores Agile principles and their corresponding impact on technology-driven change management.
Cutter Consortium Fellow Robert Charette starts off the issue by looking at failure through an incredibly intriguing lens: what if failure is "the desired outcome of an IT project development and that success is inadvertent"? He then proceeds to set the “conditions” necessary for the pursuit of failure. He then goes on to test — and largely confirm — his “cynical theory.”
Ralph Menzano takes us directly into the C-suite through a series of discussions he had with CIOs and other executives about why so many damn technology projects fail. His article probes some of the causes of failure often ignored by the research community.
The authors focus on the role that communication plays in technology project management. They suggest that many conventional problems as well as some more strategic ones can be reduced, if not solved, by developing a communication plan that spans the entire project lifecycle, beginning with the stakeholder communication strategy.