IS Failure: Just too Much Information?

摘要

Many Information Systems (IS) projects are failing to achieve their advertised benefits and outcomes, yet there is no single cause. Continued poor performance and failure is costing organisations large amounts of money, time and affecting their competitive advantage while threatening the integrity of Information Systems as a professional discipline. It is difficult to take a profession seriously when perhaps as little as 16% of IS projects are delivered on time. It is even more difficult to imagine that passengers would ever board an aircraft if only one in five planes functioned as planned. This is the scale of the dilemma that faces the IS industry. Numerous studies have proposed causes for IS project failure. A common theme with these causes is that they are action or implementation based. In other words, it is because of an action failing to occur or being executed correctly that the IS project failure eventuates. This is a convenient because these implementation failures are often easy to identify. However, this paper proposes that the role of decision making is far more important than the actual project execution and that decision making is being made more difficult by the plethora of information available to decision makers.