By Joe Peppard, Full Professor of Executive Education and Academic Director, Smurfit Executive Development

Image courtesy:  Wall Street Journal 2023

Sept. 7, 2023— Remember that IT project that your company launched and turned out to be a bust?

The answer, of course, is yes: There are likely few organizations that haven’t been touched by some IT project mishap, or worse, disaster. How can that be? Why, despite decades of implementing IT systems, are organizations still struggling with their tech projects?

My colleague, R.M. Bastien, and I have studied hundreds of such projects, and found that the root causes of failing or underachieving tech investments were rarely where executives would ever have thought to look.

The problem: They were focusing on symptoms, not the true causes.

What are those true causes? Here are four we’ve identified—and what organizations can do about them.

This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2023. Read the full article here. Please note the Wall Street Journal is subscription based. 

Joe Peppard is a professor at University College Dublin’s Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School and academic director of Smurfit Executive Development. He can be reached at joe.peppard@ucd.ie