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To Succeed, Embrace Failure
We all know that enterprise IT projects are hugely expensive. Through my 20 years of Australian Enterprise IT I’ve seen implementation projects that cost more that development of the original software. Furthermore, many of those projects either fail or deliver marginal improvement over the processes that existed before the project.
This phenomenon used to have only marginal impact on the performance of major enterprises for several reasons. When say a financial services enterprise is employing a lot of flesh-and-blood people sitting in brick-and-mortar branches, the cost of software they implement doesn’t make much difference. Similarly, superior software was hardly a factor in competition.
However, “for the times they are a-changin’”:
To survive and prosper, enterprise should learn to implement innovative software quickly and on a budget.
The main problem is fear of failure. An enterprise project would not “fail forward fast”. It must succeed. There is no enterprise analogue of “validated learning” promoted by “The Lean Startup”. An enterprise IT project is not supposed to learn by trying and failing. Instead, the project should eliminate chances of failure by selecting reputable partners and vendors, building consensus among and whenever possible following the road well travelled.
However, these steps that do sounds reasonable are the major contributors to enterprise IT woes.
What is the solution to this calamity? Embrace limited risk to avoid massive and very expensive mediocrity that fails often. Treat innovative projects as “Lean Startups”.
I’ll cover that in details in the next post.