Clearpoint

Big IT Projects are Hard

Posted by Bain Hollister on 8 February 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: high technology, technology leadership

One of the great aspects of ClearPoint is we are in the business of helping clients achieve great things with technology.  With most of our work in either corporate, local government or State Owned Enterprise(SOE's) we find there is no shortage of challenges.

Why?  Because even with good ongoing technical leadership and best intentions,  systems and the governance around them become more complex over their lifetime.  That means higher operational costs,  difficult/impossible upgrades and a general emerging inertia around a system that makes it difficult for a business to move forward or do anything.  Over time management teams and boards grapple, expert views pile in, and the stakes and potential cost to change get higher and higher.  And the bigger IT projects get, the harder and riskier they become to deliver.  They are simply just hard to do.

How do we help?  Our philosophy nearly always is around 1) Reduction - breaking problems down into smaller manageable and executable parts and, 2) Strategy, Design and architecture - do the hard strategic design work on big systems, much, much more often.  Moreover, make architecturally significant decisions through time that smooth the lifecycle of systems and serve to avoid 'big bang' system replacements.  Difficult - doesn't always fit with Finance dept's view or the bombardment of IT product marketing.  But the reality is that enterprise systems, big or small, follow a lifecycle and some astute  planning for that lifecycle saves real money in the long term.