Software modeling is getting more fashionable, but it has a long way to go before it becomes as respectable as writing code. Which is funny in a way, because code is just one particular kind of model! Too many people get hung up on the graphical nature of modeling techniques such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML), forgetting that they have underlying textual representations as well.

The ability to organize for high performance is a source of competitive advantage. Teams are seen as a critical component of a high-performance organization. In my view, however, few IT managers accurately assess the organizational risk in failing to attend to team dynamics that lead to reliable delivery. Thus, they incur tremendous "organizational debt" in the way they structure and manage the work. That's where this issue of CBR comes in.

Would Hershey Foods Corporation's story of undelivered candy that piled up in the company's warehouses in 1999 and of the more than US $100 million in lost Halloween sales that year have been any different had close executive board-level oversight of the infamous enterprise resource planning (ERP) initiative taken place?