"Why only three percent [of perceived] successful projects?" While at Boston Consulting Group, he said, the root causes of failure were researched with the biggest single cause found to be the way the required business outcomes of a project were determined. He said there was either a lack thereof or poorly conceived requirements.

As an industry IT is making a real skill of "stuffing up" these required outcomes and business is the main culprit.

"[IT] wants to get into developing the system but business wants action and doesn't often see the requirements stage as action; therefore IT tries to guess the requirements, which is fatal."

Once the business knows the requirements for a project it works through a process of translating them into technical speak; however, Simms said because the English language is highly ambiguous people have to be quite specific about what they communicate. But there's more scope for mishaps because, "Then it's all processed by different people and can be performed offshore as well," he said. "Ask CIOs how many people in the IT [team] could give a presentation on what your company does. How can people improve a company they know nothing about?"

Simms said the process is to blame for up to 95 percent of business problems, and all too often the solutions put forward simply reinforce the symptoms."We've got to get the business process right first [and] you've got to think of the processes all the time," he said.