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Insight
ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) continues to gain ground as a standard for IT governance, despite the current recession, and there have been significant changes to the standard in its upgrade from V2 to V3. Although ITIL V3 was officially launched in June 2007, adoption of the new version has lagged, and many organizations are remaining with V2. Uptake has been slowed particularly as a result of the ongoing economic crisis.
With the spate of unusual winter weather in the US this year, a classic IT quandary actually made itself evident once more. Is more technology actually better? It's analogous to the situations that actually arose as many parts of the country wrestled with the daunting notion of how to manage snow measured in feet, rather than inches.
Computer-mediated collaboration has evolved considerably, yet the main tool we still use is e-mail, which started spreading more than 30 years ago when our needs were much simpler. Google's recent preview of its Google Wave has set the IT world abuzz, because we suddenly glimpsed a more logical (some said brilliant) way to escape the limitations of e-mail.
Whenever the topic of quality assurance (QA) over a project is brought to a conversation, testing is the first thing to come to most people's minds. QA actually goes far beyond just testing code. In any case, being test centric can become more effective from the standpoint of QA at the project level if we expand our view of testing by taking the following five considerations:
Effective governance is most critical in difficult times. When an enterprise faces stagnant or declining revenues with no clearly visible path back to growth, cutting costs is almost certainly appropriate, especially if governance was ineffective in the good times and practices got, well, sloppy. IT has no special status; it may justify a less-than-proportionate cut versus the overall enterprise -- or maybe the opposite.
