It's About PreparationCrises of different types share fundamental commonalities, such as the need to employ IT to coordinate responders and inform stakeholders. Organizations should have well-constructed and well-rehearsed crisis management plans. Such preparedness can help make any crisis response effort more effective. |
Go with What You KnowIf you have excessive technical debt in legacy applications, you should refactor them, rewrite them, or replace them with a package. Alternative approaches don't solve either the technical or the business problem. |
Evolutionary E-GovernmentIn the coming decade, governments will continue to realize incremental, technology-enabled improvements through the application of proven or emerging IT process improvement principles. Government 2.0 will continue to hold sway. |
As they say about economics, you might ignore it, but it will not ignore you. If ignored, technical debt can lead to a broad spectrum of difficulties, from collapsed roadmaps to an inability to respond to customer problems in a timely manner and even to the code becoming "toxic." The seven articles in this issue of Cutter IT Journal explain how not to neglect technical debt, what to do in case neglect has already taken place, and how technical debt techniques could be applied in domains where they have not been used before.
In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we turn our attention to a topic that has been increasingly in the public eye: social media. What was originally only an interesting diversion for a small population of techies and college students has quickly and rather explosively become a major social phenomenon — one with cultural, practical, and business implications that become more far-reaching in scope every day. So what does this all mean for us in the IT shop? How do we manage in this environment where so many of the contributing factors are not within our control? And how do we use the information we can gather from social media monitoring (SMM) to set ourselves up for success? Whether or not you have already jumped onto the social media bandwagon, you will find this installment of CBR helpful as you attempt to get a broad overall view of the potential benefits and pitfalls social media represents for your organization.
