FW: IT Work: Contract Sadness

This article hit WAY too close to home for me:

Too many CIOs cut enterprise software deals that look fabulous to the CEO and CFO but commit the people who do the real work to a nightmare of unrealistic expectations.
[http://www.cio.com/archive/091505/schrage.html]

I have lived through several such projects in my career.  In most cases, if you actually reach the "end-point" of the project you will find that you spent triple the original budget, and delivered years later than originally projected.   The funny/sad part is that these same IT managers and CIO's know how to spin the results by simply moving the bulls-eye to match the end-point of the project.  In the end, they often earn huge bonuses for this "successful" project that hundreds of employees and contractors worked to salvage in spite the poor executive decision-making that initiated them.

<rant>
I now understand the reason why U.S.A is losing its competitive edge in IT, and furthermore it explains why so much Offshoring and Outsourcing of IT is going on.   When such projects fail, its much easier to point at the vendor and blame it on them.

As a bonus, these same executives get to do it all over again in 5-10 years once this new legacy system has collapsed under its own weight.
</rant>