A Report That Most ICT Projects Fail

Yesterday I heard a senior officer of the World Bank cite a study by a well known international consulting firm that said that 90% of ICT projects in companies fail. That leads me to consider several alternatives;

1. The consulting firm that is prototypical of the firms that do ICT projects that it says usually fail, failed in this study, and their conclusion is just plain wrong.
2. The ten percent of successes are so wildly successful that they pay for the 90% of the failures (our officer's suggested interpretation.)
3. The officers of private companies are fools.
4. The officers of private companies are not acting as rational "economic men".
5. The process of setting objectives and evaluating success is dangerously flawed. (Perhaps it is hard to do, takes a lot of time and effort, gives frequent wrong answers, and is dangerous when people accept and act on those wrong answers.

How come if the projects are so unsuccessful, there are so many of them, and more to the point, the information revolution has swept industry with historically very rapid progress and changed the way all industries function in developed nations. I offer:

6. The projects build organizational and social capital, that is very hard to measure, but which accumulates and eventually results in revolutionary changes in organizations, institutions, and sectors.