Opinion: The importance of failure

For IT departments to be innovative and creative, they must be allowed to fail, says the Dorchester Hotel's Luke Mellors.

Did you ever have a brother who always seemed to get what you didn't, get praised where you got punished and never could do any wrong when everything you did never seemed right?

You see in IT we, the collective we, including boards and others who evaluate the benefit of our trade, are treated to high expectations of success without room for failure. Simply put, in the eyes of business IT cannot fail and often if it does it is in the best case scenario an embarrassment and in the worst an impetus for restructuring an organisation. This may sound like a harsh judgement but in my opinion it is the truth.

Yet even with this draconian perspective in place, many IT projects still fail. They run over budget or they fail to deliver value back to the business and, in some cases, they cost an organisation a great deal of money. Believe it or not, the frequency of failure of IT projects is directly linked to the fear of failure that clouds IT investments and projects today.

Additionally, and quite importantly, the way in which IT projects are rationalised within organisations is flawed in many cases. Often cases for innovation or introducing forward-thinking technology are based on standard and quite conservative return-on-investment, or ROI, arguments. The ROI argument is a difficult one in the world of IT. Although there must be some way of rationalising and predicting the impact of a project and investment, it has to be more dynamic than the standard ways that most businesses do it today.

There are two primary reasons for this. Firstly, most innovative large-scale IT projects seek to modify current business context in relation to how the business operates within itself and against its competition. ROI can only be based on current context and the idea of predicting the results of business evolution innovation is very naïve. However, this does not make the process of innovating foolish but rather means we have to change the traditional methods by which we define success.

The second reason is the relative speed that technology changes and the instability of technology in general. Sometimes initiatives born out of necessity and innovative thinking get overshadowed before or shortly after deployment because technology has changed the rules of the game and the initiative has lost effectiveness due to some of it becoming redundant or obsolete. Again the idea that social, economic and technological conditions and evolution should restrain businesses from pursuing an aggressive innovation-based culture is ludicrous.

The world of technology initiatives is risky and, based on the above, there needs to be transparency throughout an organisation about the risks of innovation within the context of technology. IT directors must highlight not minimise risks with respect to these initiatives.

How does one highlight the risks of innovation in a trade so fearful of failure? As a business activity I believe that IT is the most scrutinised when it comes to projects. Take marketing for example. Marketing is evaluated not on its failures but rather by the sum of its successes. Marketing regularly takes risks in order to generate, grow or sustain a business and it is evaluated not in isolation but rather over time.

What is failure anyway? One thing's for certain is that failure in itself is not finite; it is not an end but rather a beginning. One of the greatest innovators of our time failed more than a thousand times to invent the light bulb and succeeded only once. If Edison worked in today's IT regime, we would likely never have given him the chance to fail in order to succeed.

The point of this is that failure itself can be an advantage to innovation. It's a failure only if no one learns from it for the future.

I believe organisations should embrace a culture that supports innovation by evaluating its IT department on the sum of its successes over time and not on isolated project failures. This would allow managers to learn from mistakes and progress innovation in organisations by learning from the past and without fear. Furthermore, it would take away the stigma currently associated with failure in our trade that inhibits rather than promotes innovative and creative thinking.

Creative thinking is often born from adversity and not getting it right the first time. Ergo failure is a necessary part of success and in today's IT world this approach is paramount.

IT managers need to be more transparent about risks and sell these risks as part of any IT investment. Organisations must be aware there is a chance the investment initially will fail and that if it does lessons will be learnt and the organisation will continue to move forward.

The press and the board, too, should be more focused on how failure and lessons from projects gone wrong can strengthen an organisation and move it forward as opposed to concentrating too much on failures and its cost or other negative impacts on operations.

Luke Mellors is IT director at the Dorchester Hotel and a member of silicon.com's CIO Jury.