Robbing Hood…

There was an interesting article in the 5th December edition of BusinessWeek entitled ‘Shaking up Oxford’. It detailed the major challenges faced by John Hood, the new vice chancellor, in shaking up Oxford University to improve its standing in the global league of top universities. Echoing the entry I made about our fragile faith in technology, one paragraph particularly caught my eye:

‘Well before Hood arrived, they [Oxford faculty members] had developed an antipathy toward the central administration because of a bungled financial management system and other pratfalls.’

It’s a point I think I’ve made before, but the price of failed IT projects goes far beyond their immediate cost. That failure can programme itself into an organisation’s DNA and prejudice attitudes towards adopting information technology in future projects. More importantly it can erode faith and respect in the leadership team itself, even, as in the Oxford case, future management teams, undermining management’s ability to steer the business in the direction it wants.

Moral – if you are going to undertake IT projects, plan carefully, the price of failure can be larger than it might first appear.

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