Certainly in the UK, we are beset by a number of failures of high-profile government IT initiatives. I feel sure that the average run-of-the-mill IT application within any organization is taking longer to complete. Even fifteen years ago, had I come up with an IT application to support a business that was going to take a year to implement, I'd have been laughed at.

This is always going to be subjective, but there certainly seems to be a perception that applications just don't seem to be developed any faster for all the 'Rapid Application Development' going on. Jonathan Sachs developed the whole of Lotus 123 V1 in assembler code in just six months in 1982, and the whole project took only a year.