Wednesday, September 30, 2009

World Wide IT Failures

The total annual cost of worldwide IT failures is $6.2 trillion dollars, according to calculations performed by Roger Sessions, über-expert enterprise architect and CTO of ObjectWatch.

Roger presents his analysis in a blog post:

According to the World Technology and Services Alliance, countries spend, on average, 6.4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on Information Communications Technology, with 43% of this spent on hardware, software, and services. This means that, on average, 6.4 X .43 = 2.75 % of GDP is spent on hardware, software, and services. I will lump hardware, software, and services together under the banner of IT.

According to the 2009 U.S. Budget, 66% of all Federal IT dollars are invested in projects that are “at risk”. I assume this number is representative of the rest of the world.

A large number of these will eventually fail. I assume the failure rate of an “at risk” project is between 50% and 80%. For this analysis, I’ll take the average: 65%.

Every project failure incurs both direct costs (the cost of the IT investment itself) and indirect costs (the lost “opportunity” costs). I assume that the ratio of indirect to direct costs is between 5:1 and 10:1.

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