Why so many IT Projects fail?

In January 2012, Japan's Patent Office(JPO) announced that a project which aimed at renovating patent management system resulted in failure.

"Asahi reported that Japan’s Patent Office(JPO) decided to terminate their patent management system renewal project which began in 2006. They already spent 5.5 billion yen(US$70 million) and specially formed inspection committee in the organization recommended to stop the project." (asajin.com)

They must have enough resources to develop software. In fact, they spent enough time(already 6 years), money(5.5 billion yen), and human resources(best software and consulting companies).

Why on earth even such a resourceful project can fail?

Mr. Hagimoto, who worked for the government for a certain period of time in the project, analyze the cause of failure as follows.

1. The users rely on a leap of faith in IT without specifing how to use the system
2. The users did not fully analyze their workflow
3. Inadequate project management both in the vendors and the users
4. The vendor took the main role for analyzing the user's business process

He also points out business custom in Japanese IT industry, which is the relationship between system integratior(SIer) and a user company. (Publickey [Japanese only])

However, failure in IT project is not unique to Japan. In fact, a lot of IT projects result in failure every year: 10 Biggest ERP Software Failures of 2011.

Robert Frese summarize several kind of reports about success and failure in IT project. Surprisingly, according to a report, 70% of projects were not successful.

"The disturbing conclusion from this Standish report is that only 16.2% of projects were successful by all measures, and that of the 70% of projects that were not successful, Over 52 percent were partial failures and 31% were complete failures." (PROJECT SUCCESS AND FAILURE: WHAT IS SUCCESS, WHAT IS FAILURE, AND HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE YOUR ODDS FOR SUCCESS?) 

So, is an IT project naturally fated to result in fail? How can we increase the success rate? Based on Mr. Hagimoto's review, at least we have the space to improve following points.

• Defining project goals and objectives
• Stakeholders' expectation management
• Business analysis
• Project management

You may notice that all of these factors are not problems of software. These are basically organizational or human problems.  I don't know whether EA was executed in this project, but if EA wolud have been used adequately, the success rate might have increased to a certain degree. This is because EA deal with whole range of issues in an enterprise, and also it emphasis on human aspects of an IT project.

"Enterprise architecture is as much about people and social interaction as it is about processes and resource utilization. Understanding each of these aspects of an enterprise is essential to the development of accurate views of the current architecture and relevant, meaningful views of the future architecture."

Scott A. Bernard: "An Introduction to Enterprise Architecture"  

Give it some thought with EA3 Cube Framework. Patent management is one of the enterprise's business segment. "Defining project goals and objectives" and "Stakeholders' expectation management" seem to be mapped "Goals & Initiatives" layer. Business analysis would be mapped over multilayer, which might be mainly related to "Products & Services", "Products & Services", and also "Systems & Applications".  "Project management" is eliminated because it is not about an enterprise itself and has relationship with whole process of the project.
(* This is just a personal viewpoint and may not be a correct answer.)

Each vertical layer is composed "components" and each components contains substantive "artifacts", which are usually documents of analysis, requirement, design and so on. So, if they had broken down the each component, they would have crystallized some solution in the shape of artifacts.

 "Defining project goals and objectives" also defines business and organizational model after the new IT system is implemented. In other words, it defines the "future architecture" of the enterprise. Since goals and objectives are the most fundamental parts of the IT project, it will be difficult to success without clarifying them.

I can't provide detailed analysis here without any precise information about the project, and I know that the reality is not so simple. However, seeing the reasons of failure in the JPO's project, still I can't help but think that EA might have helped the project to be successful, especially in early stage of the project.