Title: How successful are Information Systems projects ? 

Speaker: Khaled El Emam, University of Ottawa and TrialStat Corporation 

Date: 24th November 2005 

Abstract: 

Over the last decade the success (defined as being on time, on budget, and functionally 
useful) rate of IS projects has been increasing, albeit slowly. Despite that increase, 
the proportion of IS projects that fail is still disturbingly high, especially for large 
projects. This talk presents the results from a recent international survey of IS projects 
showing failure rates, how projects deal with failures, and the factors that best predict 
the success of IS projects. 

Biography: 

Dr. El Emam is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Medicine, 
Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information at the University of Ottawa, 
and a Senior Scientist at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, 
where he is leading the eHealth research program. In addition, Khaled is the Chief 
Scientist at TrialStat Corporation, a company that develops data management applications 
for clinical research, and a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Agile Software 
Development & Project Management Practice. Previously Khaled was a senior research 
officer at the National Research Council of Canada, where he was the technical lead 
of the Software Quality Laboratory, and prior to that he was head of the Quantitative 
Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in 
Kaiserslautern, Germany. In 2003 and 2004, Khaled was ranked as the top systems 
and software engineering scholar worldwide by the Journal of Systems and Software 
based on his research on measurement and quality evaluation and improvement, 
and ranked second in 2002 and 2005. Currently, he is a visiting professor at the Center 
for Global eHealth Innovation at the University of Toronto (University Health Network) 
and at the School of Business at Korea University in Seoul. He holds a Ph.D. from 
the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, King's College, 
at the University of London (UK).