How many times have you been promised an IT system that will save you time and money, how often do you believe everything the salesperson/advert told you, I guess most (if not all) of the time. Yet time after time the promises are not delivered, the project don’t run on time, costs over run and ultimately the product does not deliver the goods.
Why do we allow this situation to continue, why don’t we understanding the real need for the IT solution in the first place and ensure it actually arrives on time and on budget.
There are probably many reasons for this all too familiar sounding story, but the primary reason is a lack of understand of the problem, too many times managers see a problem and react by calling in IT to solve it, without getting to the root cause of the problem and working with the teams involved in the work to improve the situation first.
How can the IT people truly understand the problem if they have not experienced the pain the teams in the work are going through, without seeing where the bottlenecks are in the system and without understanding what the customer of the system wants from it. The answer is - they CANNOT.
If organisations are going to truly benefit from any future potential IT investment then they must first truly understand the problem they are trying to tackle, and during this understanding involve the IT specialists, this will result in a solution that works, that will be delivered on time and to budget.
