Popular Press

Pulling the Plug - InformationWeek (March 1993)
Identifying and Preventing Runaway Systems Projects - American Programmer (March 1995)
Software Project Escalation and De-escalation: What Do We Know? - Cutter IT Journal (December 2003)
Mum’s the Word - Beyond Computing (June 1995)
Speaking Out to Outsiders - Beyond Computing (July 1995)
Let's Be Realistic - Beyond Computing (October 1995)
Would You Step on Board an IT Project Named Titanic? - Social Science Space (2023)

In Media - Excerpts from selected media articles.

(by Todd R. Weiss, Computerworld, June 10, 2005)

Mark Keil, a professor of computer information systems at Georgia State University in Atlanta and a researcher on failed IT projects, said the plug should have been pulled in 1994, when the system failed to work as designed.

“Whenever you talk about building the biggest system in the world, the most complex, you should take pause,” Keil said. “That is often a warning sign with these projects.”

(BusinessWeek online, September 6, 2001)

One reason that CEOs must be on top of technology is that IT blowups can trash their company’s stock. On average, companies lose $670 million in market value over a two-day period after announcing an IT-relating problem, such as a hardware or software glitch, according to research by Mark Keil of Georgia State University and Anandhi Bharadwaj at Emory University, who looked at companies with an average market cap of $27 billion.

“In most of the cases that I am familiar with, the management issues are the most important reasons that the projects got messed up,” says Keil, an associate professor of computer information systems. “Inadequate specification of what the requirements are for the project is often the cause of these failures.”

(by Kim S. Nash, Computerworld, October 30, 2000, pp. 32-33)

“There’s a natural tendency to get overly committed to something, especially when there are no clear signals telling you you are off course,” said Mark Keil and associate professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

The infamously buggy baggage-handling system at the Denver International Airport is one case that offered unambiguous proof of technology glitches: shredded luggage. But test of most questionable It projects don’t yield such graphic evidence.

In large systems integration or ERP deals, “there’s no torn suitcase sitting at your feet to wake you up,” said Keil, who has studied IT disasters for nine years. “So it’s a lot easier to delude yourself into thinking things aren’t that bad.”

An outsider can “walk into the project setting for 20 minutes, talk to a few people and come to the conclusion that things have run amok. But people inside may not even be aware,” Keil said.

(by Kim Nash, Baseline, January 2003, pp. 22-24)

“We, in this profession, can’t seem to learn from failures,” says Mark Keil, associate professor of information systems at Georgia State University. While aviators, civil engineers and others systematically study failures to avoid future mistakes, technology managers largely don’t,” says Keil, who studies failed tech projects. “There’s a tendency to sweep them under the rug.”

(by Gary H Anthes, Computerworld, May 2, 1994, pp. 107-110)

“Scope creep is a big problem,” Keil says, “When we talk to people about what project management difficulties they are having, that will be the first thing out of their mouths.”

“Sometimes scope creep is a manifestation that users don’t want the system,” Keil says. “But rather than saying they don’t want it they say ‘I think I would use it if it just had this feature or that feature.’”

(by Dick Jones Communications, News Wise, March 31, 2014)

Misreporting of project statuses, at all levels of the company, is often to blame for corporate projects failing or ballooning in cost, according to a new study published in MIT’s Sloan Management Review. The study, conducted by a team of researchers from the business schools at Wake Forest University, Georgia State University and the Miami University of Ohio, determined that everything from cultural predispositions to career aspirations motivate people to misreport.

(by Jennifer Oliver, Robinson Stories, August 22, 2016)

Critical to the success of any IT project is management understanding the scope, timeline and budget, and being committed to the success of the project. Projects should have defined beginnings and end points and concrete goals, as well as a plan for the process of completion. Likewise, good communication among those involved and accurate reporting can set an IT project on the path to success.

“It’s really hard to create the kind of environment, and to maintain that environment, where people feel free to speak up without negative consequences. That’s called a climate of psychological safety,” said Mark Keil. “When projects get off track for any number of reasons, and they will,” Keil shares, “teams can be more effective and organizations can be more effective if there is psychological safety.”

“Project reporting is a major issue,” says Keil. There are two ways in which reporting can go wrong – when people report project status that is more optimistic than reality, putting a positive spin on the status and when people are too pessimistic and put a negative spin on the status. Keil says, “This is sometimes referred to as Chicken Little reporting – the sky is falling all the time, whether the sky is really falling or not.”

“The research we have done suggests that both kinds of biased reporting occur, but people are more apt to engage in optimistic biasing than pessimistic biasing,” Keil continues. “The problem is that if optimistic reporting occurs, the higher ups in the organization are going to have a rosier picture in their mind of the project progress than is actually the case. That creates all kinds of issues because now they are going to be surprised when they learn the project is over budget or over schedule.”

“What’s interesting to me is how you create an organization structure and culture that encourages accurate reporting,” says Keil. “The auditing approach would say that people are going to be dishonest. They are going to look for reasons to misrepresent the true status of the project so we have to audit the heck out of our projects.”

However, the audit approach can actually have an adverse effect whereby the people who are being audited, rather than being more forthcoming, actually engage in more deception. “So you get into this vicious cycle that we’ve written about in some of our research where you think you are doing the right thing by increasing audit scrutiny, but it actually backfires,” said Keil.

(by Kimberly Weisul, CBS News, December 21, 2010)

In a paper published in the California Management Review, Mark Keil, a professor at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, and Magnus Mahring, a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, explain the signs that a project has crossed over from merely unwieldy to black hole territory. While the duo are specialists in information technology, Keil says, "I have no reservations saying these steps apply to other types of projects."

Over more than a decade, Keil and Mahring have conducted in depth surveys of 579 information technology auditors and published case studies of four large IT implementations.

(by Jenifer Shockley)

The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia has reappointed Mark Keil, John B. Zellars Professor of Computer Information Systems (CIS) at Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business, as a Regents’ Professor, the highest professorial rank within the state’s system of public colleges and universities.

Regents’ Professorships are bestowed on the most distinguished faculty of the University System, whose scholarly achievements are recognized nationally and internationally as innovative and renowned. Appointments are made by the Board of Regents on the recommendation of university presidents and reflect excellence in academics, research, scholarship, and creativity. Keil was initially appointed a Regents’ Professor in 2019.

(by Nisha Hood, SUU News.com, April 19, 2013, p. 1)

“98,000 deaths per year is the equivalent of four jumbo jets falling out of the sky killing everyone onboard, every week of every year. This makes medical errors one of the leading causes of death in the U.S.”

“The bottom line is that while we may be among the wealthiest countries in the world, we are certainly not among the healthiest. This is a sobering thought for those who think America has a great healthcare system.”

(by Jason Morton, LaGrange Daily News, July 2, 2003)

While the fate of LaGrange Internet TV remains undecided, a team of researchers is studying what motivates people to use or not use the free service and whether a difference exists between the users and nonusers.

“When you start a project of this magnitude, what criteria do you use to determine whether the experiment was successful? Keil said.

“We’re trying to understand what are the levels of adoption above and below the digital divide so we can explain: one, is there a difference in the adoption rate? And two, what are the factors that may explain that difference? Keil said.

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