株式会社IT Mieruka リサーチ
IT Mieruka Research Co. Ltd.
1. Bottle neck of raising the national GDP
Increasing IT investment and applications is thought to raise the national GDP. Thus, IT development projects (IT projects) must achieve their goals for quality, cost, and delivery (QCD). To this end, methods for project managers such as PMBOK and ICB have been developed. However, based on major surveys of IT projects including reports by Standish Group, the achievement rate of QCD goals of IT projects (ARP) has not improved in many years. Furthermore, it is concerned that IT defects, which influenced negative effects to our social and economic activities, are increasing nowadays when our society widely introduced IT systems (Figure 4).
Figure 4 IT Defects/Year Broadcasted by Japanese News Media (IPA Report)
2. Subject for IT firm
The best seller book in IPA’s SEC BOOKS (“Mieruka of IT project”) consists of tangible tools like check items for project managers by aggregating them from tacit knowledge of experienced field managers in IT industry. Tacit knowledge for improving organizational management should also exist in many IT companies. IPA had been taking a role of practicing activity to aggregate such tangible tools based on tacit knowledge (, hereafter Mieruka activity). However, particularly after IPA closed the sectional meeting related to Mieruka, we can hardly observe such activity.
The following negative spiral may have been activated. Tacit knowledge acquired by field experience, which had not been aggregated by IPA’s Mieruka activity, begun to disappear due to changes including retirements of experts. This might cause the increasing IT defects, since loss of the tacit knowledge obtained at past experiences to prevent future IT defects increases reproduction of IT troubles. This might also have been a cause of less improvement of ARP for a long time as the Standish reports. If we have no countermeasure, loss of such tacit knowledge continues increasing.
Since IPA/SEC already ended almost all of its activities to improve ARP by expecting private organizations to take the role to keep aggregating and transferring such tacit knowledge to tangible tools, another question is as follows.
[Subject] No organizations in IT firm have taken leadership to practice the Mieruka activity at
present.
3. IT Mieruka system
To increase IT facilities and the GDP by increasing ARPs of IT goals, any of private organizations should practice the Mieruka activity and create a system for keeping aggregating tacit knowledge and share them in tangible information, since the government organization IPA less takes the role any more. The system, named IT Mieruka system, can be described in Figure 5.
Since no private organization had took leadership to create such IT Mieruka system for IT industry yet, IT Mieruka Institution (ITMI) was established to implement the system by re-organizing former members of IPA/SEC sectional meeting of Mieruka. After starting of the activities from 2015, the negative spiral mentioned in previous section is expected to change to the positive spiral by reducing IT troubles, if IT experts participate in activities in the system to develop tangible tools and use the aggregated tools sufficiently.
Thus, IT user/vendor companies as well as IT associations for user/vendor companies are suggested to increase success rate of IT projects by promoting IT experts to participate in such Mieruka activity.
Details of ITMI’s activities can be obtained by visiting the following site.
Figure 5 IT Mieruka System
