By David Bicknell
In a column for the Wall St Journal, Frank Wander, a former CIO of the Guardian Life Insurance Company, has warned that ignoring the human factor is a sure route to the failure of IT projects.
He points out that, “Sixty years into the information economy, information technology projects, especially large ones, still fail, or under-perform, at disheartening rates. Trillions of dollars of collective project experience, and, what long ago, should have become a predictable undertaking, remains an area of dissatisfaction. Yet, the performance of our technology infrastructure (devices, networks, storage) has made quantum leaps forward over that same time period.”
He argues that workers are the most expensive, but least understood tool. In the insurance industry, for example, talent represents 63% of IT cost, according to a 2011 Gartner report.
He concludes: “As an industry, we must remove this blind spot, recruit the best talent, nurture it and unlock the full productivity potential by designing social environments where the chemistry enables IT to flourish. Companies that understand this, and embrace it, will win; the rest will compete in a race to the bottom.”
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