Connected Magazine

How to avoid IT project failure

Ian Campbell asks leading IT analysts why business transformation is so hard and what to do to make it successful

Bjørnar Jensen, senior partner and leader of McKinsey Technology Europe: “What we are seeing is what I would call full-stack outsourcing, where a suite of capabilities were given away to the lowest cost provider, in many cases weakening skills in many organisations,”

The pursuit of digital transformation has dominated boardroom discussions for many years, yet success in deploying modern technologies that drive profitability has proved difficult to achieve. According to McKinsey, the success rate has been stubbornly stuck at around 30 per cent, which means 70 per cent of organisations are embarking on projects that fail to deliver on their financial expectations. That’s a lot of failure to explain away.

Talk to analysts and recurring themes emerge ...