Government IT Project Woes and Estimating Total Ownership Costs

A recent government report showed 81% of budget or $57 billion in IT projects in danger of failing. Detailed reports on the hearings can be found here.     Of 413 IT projects identified by OMB and federal agencies NEARLY 80% OF THEM WERE IDENTIFIED AS HAVING BEEN POORLY PLANNED. The scorecard for IT projects shows much progress but much work left to do.

Some of our recent analysis of IT costs seems to indicate that software development may be the smallest of four components:

1. Software Development
2. Software Maintenance
3. IT Infrastructure
4. IT Services

In this example sanitized system we see software development costs (the costs many track the most.. and for good reason.. these are the highest risk items) were about 10% of the total cost of ownership.  Meta analysis shows IT Infrastructure & services can be 60% or more of the system’s total ownership cost.

Related posts:

1. Establishing the ROI on Software Through Examination of Total Ownership Costs I get so excited when an organization does a true business case and evaluates cost versus benefits of a software...
2. The Total Ownership Cost of IT Systems It is interesting to see how the much of the industry speaks of IT system cost problems while ignoring a...
3. Reducing Software Maintenance and Total Ownership Costs Over 75% of the costs of software are in software maintenance. To address this I (Dan Galorath) participated in a...
4. Software Measurement and Total Ownership Costs… Dan’s Presentation at the NYC SPIN I had the opportunity to present at the New York City SPIN http://www.nycspin.org last week.  The topics included software measurement,...
5. Total Cost of Ownership: Development is (only) Job One Planning software development projects is never an easy undertaking. Customer and competitive requirements, time-to-market, architectural and quality considerations, staffing levels...

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