It's tough to pull the plug, even though IT professionals know that somewhere between 50-70% of all IT projects ultimately fail. That's a lot of wasted money, time, and effort. But declaring failure is not always an acceptable part of the culture. So we modify, tweak, fail, and declare success. It's terrible.

But in prepping to release data to the federal IT spending dashboard, the Department of Veterans Affairs scrapped or put on hold 45 IT projects that had gone off track. Gwynne (my new fav!) has the story:

This project is a tough one for agency CIO's. They are required to very publicly report and evaluate their projects. Many of them are responsible for projects that they didn't approve and in some cases went sour before their arrival. But it's important to begin to get an honest handle on IT projects and expenditures. And it's even more important to do something about them.