Lately, I've been paying attention to my memory or, perhaps, lack of it. I've noticed that, among other things, lapses are often related to the number of parallel tasks going on in my head. The more tasks I have to think about, the more I forget. So I try to focus on only a few things at a time; better to do a few things well than a lot of things poorly.

In the early 1990s, Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton developed the strategic management balanced scorecard concept to allow business to dissect its management and measurement system(s) into logical breakdowns of what matters and what doesn't. They deemed four areas important for such analyses:

Financial

I got into a discussion of component systems the other day, and afterwards reflected on how the conversation had been "so 1990s." In the mid-1990s, people debated EJB and COM components. Today, the focus is on service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and the latest XML standards.

As a consultant, one of the things I am often asked to do are project reviews: when things have not gone well, the stakeholders are looking for recommendations to get their project back on track. When projects get into trouble it is often for one (or more) of the following reasons:

[Excerpted from an article in the September 1992 Cutter IT Journal (formerly American Programmer).]

How do we think about vendors? Let me count the ways....

I've recently read a series of articles on Linux desktop options, on Sun's Java Desktop, and on Apple as an alternative desktop. Most of the articles compared OS functionality and the cost per user. What most of the writers don't seem to understand is that, for most of us, a desktop OS is simply the platform on which we run the Microsoft Office suite.

Managing risk is one of the keys to success in an outsourcing arrangement, and companies use many control mechanisms to manage risk in outsourcing deals. These control mechanisms can range from full-scale contract offices, project management offices, metrics, scorecard reporting, audits, CMMI assessments, and onsite oversight teams, or any combination of these.