Prospect Magazine: Public sector IT failures

"Complex IT projects have a poor record everywhere in the world, in both the public and private sectors. An annual survey by Standish, a US consultancy, estimates that 70 per cent fail to meet their timetable or budget, or to come up to specification. Britain is thus not alone in finding computerising government difficult. The US has experienced a spate of problems at both state and federal level. In March, the FBI abandoned, after five years of work, a $170m attempt to create a "virtual case file" for tracking suspected terrorists. But the record cost-overrun in a civil IT project was probably the US internal revenue service's $30bn tax modernisation in the mid-1990s."

From: Prospect magazine a "monthly package of essays, reviews, reportage, columns, portraits and fiction".