According to one expert, 50 percent of IT projects exceeding $2 million are destined to fail. And the potential for failure goes up to 100 percent as the project size gets much larger. On the other hand, projects of $750,000 or less have good chances of succeeding.
What this view leads to is the conclusion that complex projects are better divided up into smaller chunks. That concept was what Henry Ford applied in his assembly line. He broke up a complex production process into a series of smaller processes.
Office processes also got chunked into word processing, database management, reporting, etc with the arrival of computers.
Chunking is thus not a new concept. What is perhaps new is the suggestion that software packages should not come in the form of a complex offering. Instead, complex software should be divided up into manageable chunks using such approaches as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) where smaller software modules render specific services which together deliver the desired result.
The question is whether such a design is always possible. Earlier efforts in this direction, such as the CORBA (Component Object Request Broker Architecture), had not exactly succeeded. Read the views of one author at ZDNet Blog.
