Editor's Note: Adapt Or Prepare To Pay The PriceEditor's Note: Adapt Or Prepare To Pay The Price

What if your human-resources department failed to hire the best employees 30% of the time? What if your finance department failed to get its math right 30% of the time? What if your facilities department failed to fix broken things 30% of the time?

Hey, what's the worst that could happen? Maybe you end up working with an ex-convict, your paycheck is a few hundred dollars less than normal, the value of your 401(k) plummets, and the air conditioning doesn't work on days the mercury goes above 90. All of this would be unacceptable to most businesses.

So, how can it be acceptable, then, that three out of 10 IT projects still fail? After a few years of belt-tightening, bottom-line focusing, ROI-demanding, efficiency-driving, careful-evaluating years, how can such a failure rate still exist? That figure comes from research from the Hackett Group, which notes that 30% of all application projects lasting more than a year failed to meet business requirements at so-called "average" companies. World-class IT organizations--those that have distinguished themselves through a disciplined approach to technology with a simultaneous and coordinated focus on people, processes, technology, and information--fare much better, by the way. Even still, very few of those organizations feel their IT organizations are able to react rapidly to change.

As the economy is showing signs of improvement, the enterprise software industry is in flux, and the Unix licensing saga is in full force, there couldn't be a better time to become a highly adaptive organization.

Stephanie Stahl, Editor [email protected]

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