Asylum project beats average. (IT News).

According to Evoke Software, the recent announcement by the UK government of the failure of the [pounds sterling]777 Million system to be used by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) still puts them ahead of the average. The failure of this latest project brings to eight, out of a total of 11, recent major government IT initiatives judged to be failures. This represents a failure rate of 73%, whereas research commissioned by Evoke Software and carried out by US analysts The Standish Group showed that 83% of corporate IT projects with a budget of over $1 Million had overran or failed. The research document, which is entitled "Migrate Headaches", found that despite careful initial planning, 83% of all projects involving data migration with a budget of over $1 million either overran in time and cost, or failed outright. So with failure rate of 73% the government is actually ahead of the game. What makes the whole situation worse is that although the increased or wasted cost of these projects is sign ificant, it is dwarfed by the loss in business value that occurs when the implementation of a new business system or data warehouse is either delayed or cancelled. One of the primary causes of project overruns and failures is a lack of understanding of the source data. The study involved a series of focus groups with IT executives in four US cities. According to these executives, 60-80% of the effort in data migration projects is expended on trying to understand and map the source data. The study concluded that if source data could be understood more efficiently and accurately, then the project's business value could be delivered on time, or even accelerated.

www.evoke.com