InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology
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15 Budget Busting Technology Projects


09/28/2010 Large-scale information technology projects can balloon to inconceivable figures very quickly with endless revisions, change orders and delays pushing budgets into the stratosphere. Sometimes the cost of an IT project can be measured simply in dollars, but just as often these projects costly in other ways -- in reputation, for example. With government projects, it's easy to look at the budget and see how much it costs -- or at least how much it's supposed to cost. In the private sector, it's not as clear cut: often the people working on a specific project are employees of the company anyway, so you can't really measure the cost of the project in just dollars and cents. Many of the projects and products here the $100 million barrier; others are harder to put a figure on yet have to be considered "expensive" by any measure. Regardless of how you quantify it, these 15 projects cost their organizations a bundle.
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Earth Simulator

Japan's National Space Development Agency and the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation received authorization for an Earth Simulator in 1997, and NEC Corporation made the winning bid. The result was delivered in 2002, and the 640-processor-node machine's 35.86 teraflops/second performance kept it at the top of the speed charts for two years, when it was displaced by IBM's BlueGene/L. But its price has kept it on top of the money charts -- the Japanese government estimated it cost $400 million, making it the most expensive computer ever built.

SEE ALSO:

IT Hall Of Shame

7 Biggest Microsoft Flops Ever

IT Hall Of Shame, Part 2


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