  This paper argues that IT failures diagnosed as errors at the technical or
project management level are often mistakenly pointing to symptoms of failure
rather than a project's underlying socio-complexity (complexity resulting from
the interactions of people and groups) which is usually the actual source of
failure. We propose a novel method, Stakeholder Impact Analysis, that can be
used to identify risks associated with socio-complexity as it is grounded in
insights from the social sciences, psychology and management science. This
paper demonstrates the effectiveness of Stakeholder Impact Analysis by using
the 1992 London Ambulance Service Computer Aided Dispatch project as a case
study, and shows that had our method been used to identify the risks and had
they been mitigated, it would have reduced the risk of project failure. This
paper's original contribution comprises expanding upon existing accounts of
failure by examining failures at a level of granularity not seen elsewhere that
enables the underlying socio-complexity sources of risk to be identified.
