Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

"We are seeing that market leaders in all industries are increasingly using outsourcing as a way to build and sustain competitive advantage."

A couple of weeks ago, I commented on the strategies for recruiting additional software engineers in the face of personnel shortages. Since then, I've seen three or four indications that another strategy is gaining popularity in several parts of the country: hiring and training high-school students as "paraprogrammers." I use the term here in the same sense as "paralegal" or "paranurse," and I think it's just as relevant and valuable.

A couple of weeks ago, I commented on the strategies for recruiting additional software engineers in the face of personnel shortages.

As we all know by now, you cannot manage what you do not measure, which has been taken to its extreme in the TQM movement. But what should be the metrics of IS? Should it be input or output, or output per input? Lines of code per labor hour, or ROI perhaps.

The notion of a "post mortem" is familiar to most software developers and project managers: at the end of an application development project, a report is written to document the good, the bad, and the ugly experiences, so that future projects can learn and improve. In theory, it's a useful concept; in practice, it's largely ignored.

The notion of a "post mortem" is familiar to most software developers and project managers: at the end of an application development project, a report is written to document the good, th