Abstract:
Three IT projects over the past six years in Australia have been
catastrophic or near catastrophic for their organizations. There are
many IS success stories throughout the literature, but examining IS
failure provides rich insights into both good and bad practice. A
major element of good practice concerns IT governance, that is,
the patterns of authority for key IT activities in business firms,
including IT infrastructure, IT use, and project management [8].
The three case studies we cover here all show that senior management
sometimes lacks awareness of the importance of IT and its
governance on the success of large IT projects. Yet the importance
of IT governance is largely ignored in the failure literature (see [3]
for a review of that literature). We call such failure in governance
of IT projects "managerial IT unconsciousness."
