IT project risk assessment of learning organizations by fuzzy set and systems

Purpose – IT projects carry high risk of failure due to the existence of great obstacles during the planning, application and development phase. The projects' risks are multi-dimensional, and they must be assessed by multi-attribute decision-making methods. The purpose of this article is to provide analytic tools to evaluate the learning organization's IT project risks under incomplete and vague information. It was also aimed to place the risk in a proper category and predict the level of it in advance to develop strategies to counteract the high-risk factors. Design/methodology/approach – In this study, three mutual approaches were used to analyze the organizations IT applications. These are enterprise analysis for determination of information requirements of organization, payback method for IT project financial analysis and risk assessment using fuzzy sets and systems. The developed fuzzy model is an expert system which can predict the category of risk for IT projects in learning organizations. Findings – This study revealed that the greatest obstacles to IT project success were the lack of organizational learning, resistance to change, etc. User involvement limitation was found to be also one of the common reasons of IT project failure. The information sharing policy was determined to increase productivity of employees in offices and to decide the creators and the users of knowledge. Learning is a continuous process for organizational transformation. Individual and organizational learning were searched to minimize the level of risks factors and learning culture. IT project risks were categorized properly using fuzzy sets and systems to reduce or even eliminate high risks. Originality/value – The paper is original and gives the first such work for industry.