Is IT really to blame for troubled projects or does the business play a role?

It's case by case. In Japan, there are not much business persons who can understand and describe what they need from IT nor even cannot create their processes, and these persons usually make to delay and change their requirements. Also there are may IT person and managers who cannot understand clients' request and cannot make these into IT systems, also they don't understand their projects' situation but they can create schedule, WBS, etc which don't describe their situation properly.
it may be same in any place.

Peter - - thanks for the thought-provoking answer. It's hard to imagine that anyone could seriously suggest that the CIO should not be involved with delivery. The notion that strategy can somehow be divorced from the messy realities of execution and delivery seems like patent nonsense, right on its face.

In fact, what would a CIO role even look like if it were disconnected from delivery?

Michael, I wrote an article on this for a PM newsletter.
For a decade or more, it has been fashionable to beat up the IT departments of the world for their historical failure to engage the business, to “align” or as the new buzzword has it, to “integrate”... Well, not so fast. It takes two to tango... It is worth asking what these people were doing all the time IT was supposedly failing to engage.
http://www.trainingnavigator.co.nz/emag2/?heading=The+Project+Skeptic:+IT+has...

OK, here are 2 sides of the story: IT are not capable to understand business processes properly, but due financial criteria Capex for projects sits in IT Department, so in case of failure - blame is in IT as well. Never ever in my career IT department responsible for ERP implementation was big of a use

Great article by ITSkeptic with some great points.

I think the answer is maybe to look at organizations that have gotten it right. That have moved past "BITA" where "IT is not viewed as a ‘service provider’ to the business, nor is the business seen as the customer to IT. Instead, there is an obvious strategic alliance that recognizes the true customer and the true objectives of the business" (this is from an upcoming itSMF Forum article I submitted that is running later this month on getting beyond BITA.

One of the sources of inspiration was an article that ran in Computerworld back in May;

Title: These CIOs go way beyond IT-business alignment.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/348634/Beyond_Alignment

I actually had the opportunity to work with one of the organizations. It's real when you see it working. And as Skep indicates - It requires change, transparency and understanding on BOTH sides to be successful.

Some IT people think they know everything so they don't communicate the information to business very well. Business on the other side want to know everything, hate to approve everything and the most important don't want someone else to take their roles.

Probably both, but in unraveling over $500 million of failing projects the common theme that I've encountered is that both IT, and more specifically the CIO, is not postured to say "HOLD IT, that change is going to affect the schedule and ROI/MPV used to justify the project, we've got to go back to the justification process".

Clearly some projects are in trouble because of something IT is doing or not doing, but the knee jerk reaction is to always blame IT. The only way to know for sure is for the CEO to require a monthly status report that begins with the question: " Does the project remain on schedule and budget to deliver the exact benefits used to justify the investment? If no, explain fully to include who authorized the change and why."

Someone once said "sun light is a wonderful disinfectant" and that is exactly what the above question provides, light on the real problem.

Jim Smith
CEO, Enterprise Management Group

Based on my knowledge and experience it takes the IT department and the business department within an organization to meet any project obligations and deadlines. Companies will need to utilize all the departments within their organizations to have success with any project. I worked on a project in college related to the Cisco ERP implementation and the project was a success because the company utilized the skills of all the departments IT, Business, HR, etc, and some outside experts for success of the project. IT should not be the blame for troubled project because the business plays an important role.

With all due respect, when someone says something like, "Delivery doesn't matter... to the CIO" (a line from the IT Skeptic's recent blog post), that's usually an awfully good indicator that that person has never BEEN an actual CIO. (Just try interviewing for a CIO job and running the "delivery doesn't matter to a CIO" line by the company interviewing you. Good luck with that.)

In fact, CIOs that focus solely on strategy, and who think that all that operational messiness is just to be delegated to lieutenants, very often fail. Their strategy quickly or eventually outruns the company's ability to execute, and they're left usually pointing fingers. I've seen it again and again. Strategy needs to dovetail with execution and with operational excellence, otherwise it's whistling in the dark. Those who think that the two can be viably separated are essentially arguing that we've somehow collectively SOLVED all the operational issues, that they're now essentially trivial, and C-level people won't need to worry about them. Read Michael's blog for a while, consider his case studies of IT disasters, and think about where things failed. It's not nearly so simple.

Those of us who take what I see as the very reasonable stance that BOTH strategy and operations must be in the purview of the CIO are anything but what the strategists paint us: focused solely on basic IT, or reacting as "we don't like that idea" just out of some kind of defensiveness or turf protection. It's because balancing the two matters, in a very real sense, when it comes to overall success of the enterprise.

Getting back to the question: IT/business alignment. Rather than deriding it as unnecessary or having people trot out random and bizarrely disparaging statements like "it's always easier to teach a businessperson technology than a technology person the business", let's start emphasizing mutual core respect, and collaboration, baked in from the start. I wrote a recent post on this, called "Yes we can, yes we must: the ongoing case for IT/business alignment." (http://www.peterkretzman.com/2010/03/18/yes-we-can-yes-we-must-the-ongoing-ca...)
Some of the trends described in the ComputerWorld article cited above by John M. Clark is an excellent case in point. That core approach, aiming towards a collaborative convergence of business and IT, is a lot better "ladder up" to solving this very real problem than just shrugging that "delivery doesn't matter ... to the CIO".

IT is there to support business projects and shouldn't be blamed for hindering them. Lack of a sufficient IT infrastructure or users being unfamiliar with IT capabilities and functionalities in order to reap the full benefits from it may be an issue.

On the other hand it DOES take two to tango. CIOs need to be up to the engagement, as I just posted on my blog a moment ago:

We should indeed "lift the CIO above the standard oh-so-trivial concerns of delivery and technology", or rather the CIO ought to lift themselves. That's not to say we deliver information via technology with any less effectiveness or efficiency. It means that IT Doesn't Matter: delivery is becoming increasingly less arcane and more mundane - it ought to be delegated to competent lieutenants. Of course some IT people don't like that idea.

Nobody is "dismissing the importance of basic IT facets". They're saying that if that is all you do, then you are akin to a wage-slave who's never going to rise above the 9-5. I agree. And I think ITSM is the ladder up.

http://www.itskeptic.org/rich-it-poor-it-or-opposite-day