Big IT initiatives are 20 times more likely to crash and burn than other business initiatives, Oxford University researchers concluded after studying 1,471 IT projects over the last decade.

One of the main reasons for all this IT failure: Not considering "black swan"--or unpredictable--events when planning the projects, reports eWeek's Fahmida Y. Rashid.

On average, major IT projects take 55 percent longer than anticipated to finish, and they run 27 percent above budget, the researchers at Oxford's Said Business School's BT Centre for Major Programme Management found. IT project managers tend to focus on the average performance of projects that came before, rather than considering high-impact risks.

"IT projects are now so big and touch so many aspects of business, government and citizens' lives that this poses a singular new challenge for top managers," said Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg, principal investigator and founding chair of Major Programme Management. "Any company contemplating large technology projects should ask whether the company is strong enough to absorb the hit should it go over budget by 400 percent."

Some of the projects that the Oxford researchers examined were doomed by "rare and huge events" that planners should have identified at the outset, Rashid writes. These ran an average of 197 percent over budget, they found.

Some projects, including major software implementations, run a high risk of running over budget, while others, like hardware infrastructure deployments, run a low risk.

Project managers should spend more time thinking about low-probability, high-impact risks before launching major IT projects because IT failures can have an enormous effect on the company as a whole. They should also think about economic factors, including predicted variables, that could have an impact on the company's capacity to deal with project delays and cost overruns. 

In somewhat of a surprise, the study found that the private sector was failing about as badly as the public sector in major IT projects.

For more:
- see Fahmida Y. Rashid's article at eWeek

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