According to a recent white paper titled “The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity,” IT failures ended up costing the global economy a whopping $6.2 trillion. Or so says Roger Sessions, a noted author on complexity who developed a model for calculating the total worldwide cost of IT failure.
For the nuts and bolts of Sessions’ formula, you can read the white paper here, but the end result is that the U.S. accounted for $1.2 trillion of the total failure, and the worldwide IT failure costs $500 billion per month, according to his calculations. However, not everyone agrees with how Sessions came about those numbers.
“Unfortunately, Sessions is fundamentally wrong in his numerical analysis, and his numbers are off by more than ‘ten or twenty percent.’ For the Federal Government alone, they are off by almost a full order of magnitude (10x),” said Bruce Webster an IT failure expert consultant.
According to Webster, Sessions made quite a few mistakes, including incorrectly interpreting government-supplied data regarding IT failure rates and associated costs, and wrongly extrapolating limited U.S. data to the remainder of the world, among other goofs.
You can read Webster’s detailed arguments here.
