Eating the IT Elephant: Moving from Greenfield Development to Brownfield

Chapter 1. Eating Elephants Is Difficult

	“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”
	--Robert Heinlein

<feature><title>Chapter Contents</title> <objective>

Today’s Delivery Methods 4

</objective> <objective>

Why Do Big Projects Fail? 5

</objective> <objective>

Environmental Complexity 13

</objective> <objective>

Brownfield Sites Must Be Surveyed 20

</objective> <objective>

Endnotes 21

</objective> </feature>

Information technology can now accomplish immensely complex tasks, but despite the IT industry’s major strides forward, a disturbing statistic remains: Nearly 70 percent of really big IT projects fail.

This book is all about making these kinds of projects succeed.

In the past 35 years, the computer has changed so much that it ...