Why Software Projects Still Fail Despite Massive IT Spending

Global IT budgets have tripled since 2005, rising from $1.7 trillion to $5.6 trillion in constant dollars. Yet software success rates have barely budged, and failures continue to drive up business and social costs as systems touch every part of our lives. Hyped AI tools and coding assistants can’t solve complex trade-offs across systems engineering, project management, finance and organisational politics. Most IT projects suffer from misaligned goals and management blind spots that AI alone can’t repair. As I noted two decades ago, recurring drivers of failure include unrealistic or unclear objectives, uncontrolled complexity and unmanaged risks. Decades of after-action reports and academic studies show the same preventable mistakes over and over. The real question is why we keep repeating these known errors instead of learning from past experience.

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