Guest editorial: Grand successes and failures in IT: Private and public sectors

摘要

The recent abandonment of a multi-billion dollar project in the UK to computerize health records provides testimony that knowledge accumulated in the MIS field has failed to impact successfully on policy and practice. The larger the scale of such IS implementations, the higher, it appears, is the risk. Implementation of organisation wide systems (for example, ERP), automated supply chain management enabled by Inter-organisational systems (IOS), emerging technologies (such as Cloud computing) add further complexity both at the project and system level, thereby augmenting the risk of failure. Other recent examples of major failure in both public and private sector include: Sainsbury's failed automated logistics system, the much-publicised software problems of the Toyota Prius, and the UK Government's abandonment of national ID cards. Technology enabled global practices (such as outsourcing) have also fundamentally changed the way that IS/IT is developed. Such practices have advantages but in themselves bring new risks, which can lead to failure, causing significant economic loss to the organisations.