If and when I develop the "software crisis" theme, I should make sure to note how deeply ironic it is that my own research is only made possible by an information infrastructure so incredibly powerful that it truly deserves to be called a "software triumph", even as present-day articles continue to bemoan a "software crisis".

So, for instance, not only am I able to scour the whole Web for instances of the "71% of project that fails do so from poor requirements", I can even use the date stratification trick I mentioned earlier to pinpoint the exact source.

This is a CIO Magazine article from 2005 by a Christopher Lindquist, and the only source cited is "Analysts report that..."

As you can verify by running variants of the following search: http://bit.ly/wXtoB7 - the claim is nowhere to be found before this date, but becomes widespread afterwards; the claim is immediately picked up by various secondary sources, many of which quote it verbatim, but with even more changing the wording slightly.

The fun thing is that the attributions change more recently, in 2011:
- a fellow named Victor Font attributes it to "Grady, 1999" (1)
- the NASCIO conference 2011 page attributes it to "Butler Group" (2)

These apocrypha are interesting to study, because they reveal something of the telephone game's routing circuits. For instance, the Butler Group misattribution is likely due to a blog (3) which cites both CIO magazine and Butler Group, for two distinct (though equally suspect) claims. (This is kind of bad news for the US, in this foreigner's opinion - NASCIO is supposed to be "representing the CIOs of the States".)

In the Victor Font case, you can trace some of the spread, such as to a company called StratNet (4), apparently not related to Mr Font, simply by noting that Font is misspelling the name of "Liffingwell", instead of "Leffingwell" - I assume this is the Dean Leffingwell I've already encountered previously.

This is all fun and games, though, until you get the idea of running your search not in Google, which indexes the "layman's Web", but in Google Scholar: the more hallowed residence of Science.

There you will find at least one academic paper (I didn't have the heart to look for more) picking up the 71% meme (5). Look at the attribution: "...echoing earlier work by Lindquist (2005)..." Yes, this is how the careless, unsourced and unverifiable assertion of an editorialist becomes the "work" of an academic peer: by the adoubement of scholarly parentheses.

Here is at least one case of cross-species contagion, raising the specter of Homo Academicus' vulnerability to what we might have hoped was a disease confined to Homo Consultantus.

(Should I call it leprechaunitis? Or is that making too much of a mixed metaphor?)

(1) http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Whos-Blame-Troubled-Projects-IT-51825.S.39024193
(2) http://www.nascio.org/events/2011Annual/agenda.cfm
(3) http://basftw.blogspot.com/2010/06/something-for-weekend-new-in-at-1.html
(4) http://www.stratnet.ca/?c=blog&l=en&art=20110305-1
(5) http://proceedings.informingscience.org/InSITE2008/IISITv5p543-551Davey466.pdf