In working with a client recently, I came up with a new and somewhat whimsical term: virtual collocation. At first, the term looks pretty silly, as a team is either collocated or it's not -- but if we can have virtual teams, why not virtual collocation?

In working with a client recently, I came up with a new and somewhat whimsical term: virtual collocation. At first, the term looks pretty silly, as a team is either collocated or it's not -- but if we can have virtual teams, why not virtual collocation?

Creating IT project portfolios has become a hot topic in the IT community. The idea is to minimize the business risk created by IT projects being acquired, developed, or operated through diversification. That is, the organization invests in a range of IT projects that have varying levels of risk so that no single IT project, if it goes sour, will place the business at undue risk.

Fifty percent of all software projects are total failures and another 40% are partial failures, according to widely quoted surveys in the UK, USA, and Norway. Large government projects in all three countries have been reported, with spectacular failure and expense to taxpayers.

Fifty percent of all software projects are total failures and another 40% are partial failures, according to widely quoted surveys in the UK, USA, and Norway. Large government projects in all three countries have been reported, with spectacular failure and expense to taxpayers.

Fifty percent of all software projects are total failures and another 40% are partial failures, according to widely quoted surveys in the UK, USA, and Norway. Large government projects in all three countries have been reported, with spectacular failure and expense to taxpayers.

Fifty percent of all software projects are total failures and another 40% are partial failures, according to widely quoted surveys in the UK, USA, and Norway. Large government projects in all three countries have been reported, with spectacular failure and expense to taxpayers.

Customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Siebel Systems, Inc., has been hit with a number of setbacks recently, ranging from poor sales to replacement of its CEO by angry investors. Now, Siebel is facing additional pressure due to speculation that it is about to be acquired. Specifically, rumor has it that the company is in talks with Oracle Corporation regarding a possible merger.

In March 2001, the Object Management Group (OMG) announced its new initiative, Model Driven Architecture. MDA held out the vision that software developers could, for the first time, write pure business logic without concerning themselves with the technical idiosyncrasies of different operating systems, languages, and middleware.

I've heard the comment that the World Wide Web is nothing new -- just a combination of existing technologies, mainly TCP/IP, the Internet, SGML,1 and affordable PCs with GUIs. This may be true, but it's certainly trivial. It's not whether the individual technologies are new or not; it's how they're put together.

At the close of the 1980s, several companies got together to form OMG. Their stated goal was to make integration easier. Specifically, they hoped to get ahead of the move toward object-oriented (OO) languages that was just beginning and propose standards that would ensure that the various OO languages could communicate with one another.

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and its first cousin Model Driven Development continue to make news in the industry. People now use MDA in a variety of ways. At one end of the real-world usage spectrum, we see instances of the complete generation of application code from UML models for embedded systems; at the other, companies are creating enterprise computation-independent models (CIMs) to provide visibility into business processes.

Recently, I was struck by a solution recommended to a major real estate company, a solution that I had a hand in crafting. I was also struck by how the adage "Everything that goes around comes around" is still so true. While we don't talk that much anymore about dumb terminals or green screens, we do talk about thin clients, server-based computing, and portals all the time.