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Insight
WHY ORGANIZATIONS MUST REINVENT I.T.
Information technology, by way of distributed systems and the Internet, has penetrated every inch of the enterprise. Business units are launching supply chain alliances, building e-commerce sites, and spinning off e-business ventures.
SEVERAL OUNCES OF PREVENTION:
Executive Update
Metrics and Other Priorities
Software metrics is one of those great ideas that just never seems to take hold. It certainly has vociferous advocates, and it is mandatory for Level 2 certification on the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model. Software metrics is available as dashboards, scorecards, and instrument panels. There are plenty of qualified consultants ready to help would-be users, but it just hasn't caught on.
MANAGING THE END FOR NEW BEGINNINGS:
When the news media began pronouncing "victory" over the dreaded Year 2000 bug a few seconds after midnight last New Year's Eve, more than a few IT managers wondered if the celebration wasn't a bit premature.
One of the "megatrends" proposed by the Cutter Technology Council is a manifestation of the "dark side" of IT systems development: projects fail, and the developer and customer sue each other for the costs incurred. Or the key developer quits unexpectedly, taking along large chunks of proprietary code.
Writing a review of one of the most significant events in IT history, it is very easy to be glib and beat our breasts. How did we get it so wrong? Why is the stock market still around 11,000 instead of 2,000? Why are we still living in thriving cities instead of shooting at each other in the wilderness?
It's good practice to wrap up a project with a postmortem, a review of what happened, what went well that could be a lesson for the future, and what went badly that needs to be avoided in the future. The Year 2000 project ought to be a particularly good source of lessons that can be applied to any other mass change project with an imposed deadline, such as the changeover to the euro currency in Europe.