Paper Info
Title
The tightrope to e-business project success
Abstract
Even though U.S. businesses spend half of their business equipment budgets on IT, only one out of six software projects is successful. Annually, this adds up to about $75 billion a year in failed projects, $22 billion in cost overruns, and another $175 million for systems that deliver less than they claim (9). The elusivity of success is rooted in organizations' inability to manage—or even recognize—the unexpected. Inattention to the emergent gap between what's delivered and what's finally needed, not technical incompetence, is what stumps even the best of intentions. Code, how- ever good, cannot compensate for poor conceptualization. A new philosophy that views software as a medium in which knowledge is embed- ded rather than a product is emerging in some circles of the software community (2, 8). Proponents of this view encourage embedding accurate knowledge into the design of a system over trying to manage requirements. Software project execution is like walking a tightrope from idea to implementation. It takes just the right balance between method- ology and imagination, and following rules and knowing when to break them. Either excess slack or inflexibility guarantee a fall. We conducted a field study to assess the mer- its of this view and determine whether embedding knowledge in software design influ- ences how well a project adapts to changing technology, unstable business needs, and customers who cannot seem to make up their mind. We found strong support for this emerging perspective: project teams that excel at knowledge integration best manage the unexpected to successfully execute innovation-intensive software projects. This article discusses the implications of our findings for software practice. From Engineering Imagination to Imagination Engineering The most difficult part of building a new system is determining what to build. Deter- mining that is clearly a process of reducing ignorance about customer needs, tech- nology, and a project's business context (3). A system is the byproduct of such knowledge. When that knowledge itself is incomplete, a project is built on an archi- tecture of misunderstood business needs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2003
10.1145/953460.953520
Commun. ACM
Keywords
Field
DocType
e-business project success,knowledge integration,software design,field study,perspective projection
Electronic business,Knowledge integration,Ignorance,Software design,Programming language,Computer science,Knowledge management,Conceptualization,Software project management,Software,Team software process,Process management
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
46
12
0001-0782
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.47
9
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Amrit Tiwana1156482.28
Ephraim R. McLean26621410.03