According to the study, the level of professionalism in software engineering is "generally lower" than in other branches of engineering, and the British education system isn't producing IT workers of a high enough calibre to cope with today's increasingly complex technology projects.
Other problems cited are a lack of project-management skills among senior managers, and a failure to implement best practice in software engineering and IT projects.
"Whilst the most pressing problems relate to the people and processes involved in complex IT projects, further developments in methods and tools to support the design and delivery of such projects could also help to raise success rates," the report said.
"In particular, basic research into complexity is required to facilitate more effective management of the increasingly complex IT projects being undertaken."
It's estimated that a total of £22.6bn will be spent on UK IT projects this year, of which the public sector will contribute £12.4bn.
The government is pushing for IT to be deployed more widely in the public sector, as part of its drive for increased efficiency. But its track record is mixed, and includes several high-profile failures such as the Libra project. This was meant to provide a standard IT system for the nation's magistrate's courts but ran massively over budget and behind schedule.
Richard Allan, Liberal Democrat IT spokesman, warned this week that it is much harder to achieve real cost savings through IT than some people understand.
"It's all about making doctors, nurses and -- dare I say it -- tax collectors more efficient," Allan told the Linux User and Developer Expo 2004 in London.
"Cost savings are the Holy Grail, but the only people who managed to find the Holy Grail were both pure and slightly deranged. I think most ministers would fail the purity test."
Click here to see the full report from the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.
Talkback
How does any of this relate to “IT workers”?
The decisions that cause major IT project failures are almost always caused by senior level business people and have more to do with personal power politics than technical issues.
In all the IT failures that I am familiar with, experienced “IT workers” knew well ahead of time that the project was doomed but could do nothing to prevent it. The fault lay entirely with senior personnel who had little or no knowledge of technology.
We need to abandon the belief that an MBA substitutes for domain knowledge. Would you want an MBA performing heart surgery on you?
IT is probably the only skill intensive sector largely managed by people with little to no IT knowledge or interest, in IT or non IT companies. These people are completely gullible and vulnerable to anything they are told by IT companies sales people.
They are also generally unable to recruit efficiently since they can't judge technical skills...
This is because the systems often have their specifications drawn up with interferance by the customer's management at best, and no reference at all to actual users at worst. Company politics often scupper a project before the ITT has been sent.
They management have their expectations set such that they expect the pay a pitance, and then have everything work perfectly.
Make it like the airline industry - conservative, and with reasonable expense. They you will get quality projects that work properly first time.
Yeah most of these project failures are due to management optamism. A lot of things fall down on the assumption that Parts will arrive when logistics say they will, and assumptions about the time taken to do things.... People forget to add extra overheads to time scales.
Also technical skills are badly judged and Team leaders either don't know the technology or are great techs but couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery.
Just in time delivery in the IT sector is a myth. It just doesn't work out that way.
I could go on and on ranting about the criminal uselessness of the IT industry but I'm sure most reading this will be very familar with it.
I agree, most of the IT workers are unskilled, specially those of the 30 to 45 age group. All those I've come across in the past 4 or more years can't even spell properly, they just didn't bother to learn when at school and picked up the minimum of skills by being sent/whatever on Employment Agency courses just because they got paid an extra £10 a week.
I've sat in on one of those courses as an observer and the trainer didn't have much more in the way of knowledge than the people they were training ... couldn't even answer simple IT questions asked by me.
No wonder the workers have little or no skills!!!