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| Explaining The Boondoggles |
September 2, 2004 |
By Peter Wolchak
There has always been a paradox at the centre of modern technology: technology runs our businesses and drives personal and corporate productivity, but sometimes it doesn’t work as billed and entire projects, worth thousands or millions of dollars, simply fail to deliver promised benefits or functionality. The industry is rife with stories of implementations that went nowhere, of good money flying after bad in bids to patch things that were never really right in the first place. So why does this happen?Backbone contacted three members of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS), Canada’s largest IT professional organization. All hold the CIPS Information Systems Professional designation, which requires adherence to a set of professional and ethical standards. We asked if the fault for failed projects can be placed at the feet of dishonest practitioners?
LIARS ON BOTH SIDES
“I sometimes look in amazement at some of the boondoggles in this industry; you wonder “How could this happen?” said Rick Penton, CIPS president and owner of Client Server Management, a Toronto consultancy that works on technology acquisitions.
“Obviously, someone isn’t doing something right. The problem is due to a mix of incompetence and dishonesty, but dishonesty plays a role.”
At issue, say the experts, is people buying technology don’t always want to hear the truth; facts may conflict with a cherished plan or objective. “If people have an agenda already, the truth might impede that,” Penton said.
The pressure to perform leads many execs to simply close their eyes and hope for the best, according to Ron Gatien, the CIPS Code of Ethics and Standards of Conduct Chair and software development manager at Aurora Bar Code Technology in Edmonton.
“If I’m an end user within an organization and I’ve made a case to buy a certain product, chances are I am not going to want to know that the product is imperfect; the worst thing I could do is go back into the boardroom and say ‘Well, this product we’ve decided to spend a million dollars on isn’t all that good.’ “No one wants to hear that. What they want to hear is the marketing and the sales strategy for going forward.”
In that situation, who can blame salespeople for telling customers what they want to hear? The job, after all, is selling.
Telling the truth “might mean putting your chances of getting the work on the line,” Penton said.
Yet when IT people bend the truth, the stage is set for failure, said Faye West, the director of information systems for the Alberta Research Council in Edmonton. West is also a CIPS past president and the chair of the board of the Software Human Resource Council (SHRC).
“When that happens, it is a very good explanation for why IT projects fail at such a high rate. If people are saying ‘Don’t tell me anything, just do what I asked’ then they shouldn’t be surprised when it doesn’t work.”
STRAIGHTFORWARD SOLUTION
The key to this, of course, is simply telling the truth. While not a panacea for what is, after all, a complex problem, it would improve the odds of success.
It starts with a corporate or even a personal code of ethics. Penton has often felt unstated pressure to be less than forthright. A preset code of conduct, he said, helps deal with that.
“The whole idea of a code of ethics is sometimes decisions are grey. Because of that, the guidance of a code of ethics, that is part of your organization or your professional designation, really makes a difference.”
What works for West is to expect the truth, and then no one will dare serve up anything else. “You are treated the way you expect to be,” she said. “So I make it clear there are no repercussions for telling me the truth and I believe, because of that, that people do.”
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