Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

I'm as cynical as most and the first to admit that a column entitled "Trust" is likely to offer platitudes. Like honesty and ethics, we all claim to believe in them. It's simply a matter of applying such a nice-sounding concept in everyday situations.

The term "personalization" is being thrown around so much by vendors and marketing folks that it's now used to describe almost any sort of customer interaction tool or application. As a result, there is some confusion as to what "personalization" actually entails.

IT metrics data -- what's happening in the industry and in your company -- takes the stage for this month's ITMS.

I'm pleased to include an article on recent IT productivity trends by Doug Putnam of QSM. Over the years, QSM metrics research has been adding new data on an ongoing basis into an industry-wide projects database. Trends have been plotted over time, and, recently, a story emerged about how we transitioned through the millennium. Something major has been happening.

The QSM database is one of the most comprehensive repositories of modern-day software projects collected worldwide. It contains trends from more than 5,400 completed software projects from North America, Europe, and the Far East, representing more than 200 million lines of code (LOC), 100+ development languages, and 55,000 person-years of effort. During the past 20+ years, QSM has maintained this database, analyzed it, and provided the results of this analysis to companies to serve as their own repository for their software and IT metrics.

Metrics is a people business. Having spent more than 15 years in the metrics field, that concept has reinforced itself with every engagement I've undertaken, first as a project leader within large companies and later as a managing partner in a private consulting and training firm. Measurement may initially seem to be about benchmarks, trends, and data, but what comes first is getting the data. And to do that, you have to be with and talk to people.

IT outsourcing continues to be a popular course of action for streamlining businesses. These arrangements always include measurements of performance and productivity improvement. The questions that we should be asking are:

• Why isn't it just as important to measure performance and productivity related to inhouse IT?
• Why don't we develop insourcing contracts as an alternative to outsourcing?

Whether IT is inhouse or outsourced, performance and productivity are important.

With the bursting of the dot-com bubble over the last year, some of the pressure for pushing IT departments onto the Internet has lessened. This is all to the good, as many companies were adopting off-the-shelf solutions that really did not fit their needs or were building poorly thought-out B2B or B2C implementations.

In February 2001, a group of "who's who" in software development methodologies convened in Snowbird, Utah, USA, to create the Agile Alliance and deliver a Manifesto for Agile Software Development (www.agilealliance.org). The Agile Alliance is a group of methodologists who have shed the use of traditional methodologies and processes. This decision was not taken lightly.