Recently, I've observed yet another disturbing trend in the software industry. The various groups I work with exhibit considerable interest in requirements and coding, but the word "design" rarely comes up. I often ask seminar audiences how they do software design. The response is usually an awkward silence. Then someone hesitantly says, "We mostly write text descriptions of our designs," or "We all draw whatever kinds of pictures we feel like."

Most successful professionals have had one or more mentors during their career. They may not have realized these people were mentors, but they were being mentored nonetheless. They were being given guidance on important career decisions. They were taught how to handle new and perplexing problems, from tricks to debugging a deadlock to understanding how to terminate an employee. I can't possibly enumerate all of the help and guidance I've received from my mentors.

A project manager was working on assigning resources to an important project with a compressed schedule and, as is often the case, there were not enough available people with the required skills and experience. As she and I talked about various strategies to deal with the situation, I noticed two available people had not been considered, and I asked why.

Software projects require us to write documents. This is especially true on government and outsourced contracts, which often require developers to come up with requirements, design specifications, and/or maintenance documents. But software developers write software for a living, not documents. Developers are neither adept at, nor fond of, writing documents. This lack of skill and desire is a bad combination. Writing a decent document under these circumstances takes too much time.

It's not how much you spend on IT, it's how you spend it!

This report is about money -- lots of money. In case you've been hiding out for a decade or so, IT organizations are collectively spending just over US $1 billion per day just on the external procurement of IT services. Yes, that's right: the $1 billion per day is exclusive of hardware costs.

Funding strategy is essential to your business-IT alignment success. If you mishandle this element of alignment, you'll have a tough time digging yourself out of chaos. Without a clear, unambiguous funding strategy, you referee more often than you navigate. It's essential that you get a good handle on what you spend, who spends it, who is responsible, and how you pay the IT bills in your organization.