The Truth About IT Consultants

Robert X. Cringely wrote an interesting article today called The Truth About IT Consultants: Some are great but most are not. If you deal with IT consultants, it's a worthwhile read.

Here's a sobering statistic from the article: "...more than 50 percent of big IT projects fail completely...". Why? According to Bob, projects sometimes fail at the requirements phase, a company may be incapable of setting their own requirements. Projects may also be "too grand" and Bob warns that companies may not realize they've bitten off too much until it is too late.

Certainly anyone involved in IT will get a chuckle out of Bob's 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants. My favorite: "Of course your data is safe".

[RicABlair]

Sometimes these blogs rely on articles without much critical scrutiny. The Cringely article was supposedly prompted by the American Lafrance financial debacle. Cringely suggests poor IT consulting and poor consulting oversight were at fault, but throughout the article the author says "probably" so many times, that the "facts" upon which he could base his conclusions are obviously inadequate. So, when a blogger cites a flawed article, those conclusions too must be taken with a shaker of salt. I'm not saying, on the other hand, this blogger couldn't have done more research and come up with a more reliable article for his ptroposals.

[mhinnewyork]

Without much critical scrutiny? Of course, all you do is criticize, you seem to need to the way normal people need to breathe. Go read someone else's blog. Michael Horowitz