83% of IT projects fail in one way or another (over budget and late for instance.) Today, the SeeBeyond folks gave a demo and overview to the software executive staff. They had a number of statistics they referenced:
– 100 new IT projects started every hour
– 31% of all IT projects cancelled
– 53% of projects late and 189% of budget on average
– Resulting in an estimated $140B/year in extra cost
Source: The Standish Group’s Chaos Report.
I don’t know about you, but I find those figures shocking. That after 40 years of concentrated effort around IT we don’t have a better success rate than 17% makes me wonder why businesses invest….but I digress.
On the brighter side, the SeeBeyond acquisition brought significantly more to the table than I appreciated. The concept of composite application brings significant business opportunity to the table for Sun and potentially, could help address the problems contributing to the rotten metrics enumerated above.
I’m particularly pleased that the CNS Sun Connection Architecture will easily adapt and in fact, thrive in the world of the composite app. Now, we’ve all got to get busy making sure we specify, design, plan, build, test, deploy, and operate them in an efficient manner. No small challenge.
So I’m trawling the news sites this morning in lieu of my morning paper (so last millennium) and I see this:
StarWreck – A Finnish spoof of StarTrek created by 300 or so people working on personal computers working collaboratively over the course of SEVEN years. They’re doing something very interesting with their masterpiece, distributing it only over the internet (straight downloads, BitTorrent, etc.)
Image captured from the movie rendered digitally
How do they make money? Well, they don’t really. They’re selling t-shirts and charging for physical media (DVDs.) My guess, they’ll pull in more Euros than they think…they’ve got an estimated 700,000 downloads since September 30.
There’s a recent example that is even closer to home, the
Sun/Google deal announced yesterday. We’ll bundle the Google desktop with each Java and Office download to start – and Sun gets cold hard cash with each instance. This is a great example of monetizing a community by adding value to the community with frictionless distribution. This is just a start, stay tuned….
Well, I wondered when this would happen. For a long time I’ve had the notion of what I called a “personal productivity pod.” For those of you who might have inclinations like me, a place to kind of shut out the world, yet remain connected. It was really something of a joke that I shared with my wife.
To my surprise (and horror) this concept has been born in the The Oculas. Click to read more. Here’s a picture of the thing:
What does this mean in the broader work and cultural sense? I don’t know, but I’m not sure I like it….
