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Wed, 22 December 2004
Requirements are real work, episode 3217
From Infoworld and the Delphi research crew comes the tale of an actual study of IT end users which tells a story you should already know: capturing requirements is hard.
Seventy percent of the respondents to an ongoing Delphi survey said they consider capturing and documenting business requirements a difficult process -- and more than 60 percent said their organization has trouble implementing changes to its processes and policies.
'In this survey, what was really notable was the very definitive responses,' said study author Nathaniel Palmer, chief analyst at Delphi (a unit of Perot Systems Corp.) 'Respondents were very explicit in identifying problem areas, like capturing business requirements. That's something that you'd think should be a core competency, but respondents overwhelmingly said they struggle with it.'
More than 75 percent of Delphi's respondents said their requirements data resides in a number of separate sources, and close to 90 percent said incomplete definition or capture of business requirements is at least a moderate problem in their organization.
Mr Gause, Mr Weinberg, the universe is finally ready for you.
Also noteworthy: the story casually mentions the latest SAP horror story. Hewlett-Packard "had done dozens of smooth ERP (enterprise resource planning) migration projects, but when its latest ran into problems, the cascading disruptions contributed to HP missing its third-quarter financial projections," Infoworld reports.
Reporting IT implementation disasters is high-risk for reporters (whose "sources" and PR story-feeders get cranky) and for publications (whose marketing departments face advertising withdrawals). The safest time to mention disasters is when everyone on the inside is so used to hearing about them that they can't strraight-facedly protest the occasional report. Back when I was still writing on IT, I heard about a dozen failed content management system implementations before I started writing about the issue.
So when you hear about one disaster, chances are there are others happening. In a sense, this is what Delphi's study confirms.
