I was reading a book about systems design recently, in which I found the following offhand quote: "Software is not is not a science, therefore...." I was immediately taken aback, since I've been studying systems (software) design for a rather long time, and I have always taken the position that software design and development is (or ought to be) a science -- a place where there are postulat

Shortly after any new idea, the inevitable query, "how long will this take?" is sure to follow. We hope that this question sparks an analytical estimate of the work involved and the effort required, but for some of you, this question may only rekindle images of your last project's death march, where an unrealistic deadline was foisted on you. In this Advisor, we look at the estimation process and some approaches for mitigating a few of its inherent challenges.

Whether or not you think it has anything to do with global climate change, you have to admit that the weather this winter has been different and dramatic.

A fundamental of configuration management is a baseline: a description of a large group of items. Baselines can be powerful tools to help manage an endeavor.

While many organizations that embark on outsourcing initiatives spend significant resources on defining the scope of the providers' responsibilities for tendering and contractual purposes, the same level of effort is seldom put into defining the responsibilities of the information and communications technology (ICT) organization that will remain (known as the retained organization).

Most talk pertaining to on-demand and cloud-based BI and analytics has focused on commercial providers offering such services. Last year, however, we saw the introduction of the concept of the private analytics cloud located behind the end-user organization's firewall.

Everything I never knew I always wanted.

-- From the movie Fools Rush In

Now why didn't I think of that?

-- Everybody

One of the leadership tasks in an agile organization is to develop a framework for value determination and use.

On the surface, business process in any of its various guises appears to be a simple, even natural, activity, but it is not. Business process change -- significant business process change -- in the real world is a very difficult thing to pull off. This is because business processes occur in one organizational dimension and "management" occurs in another.

For many years, we have been recommending that IT organizations think of themselves as a service business, with five fundamental service portfolios (you can refer to my previous Business-IT Strategies Advisors and Executive Reports for further discussion of these portfolios):

Having been in the computer business for quite a while, I've seen a number of shifts in the underlying architecture of hardware and communications. First, there were mainframes, then minis, then PCs, then local area networks, client-server, and, most recently, the Internet. Now we are faced with a combination hardware/communication/software leap onto "the cloud."

Perhaps because it is so new, social media could be one of the least understood emerging technologies around. In this three-part series of Advisors, I will apply three tried-and-true economic principles to this rapidly evolving medium:

Again and again, I'm reminded that customer relationship management (CRM) involves more that just up-selling and cross-selling. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether organizations sometimes use CRM merely as an excuse to placate themselves for failing to address bad business practices.

When people tell me they are already practicing risk management on their projects, more often than not my skepticism is justified since all they are actually accomplishing is a cursory job of risk identification.

So said Theodore Roscoe of the US Navy's Mark XIV torpedo during the early stages of World War II in his book, United States Submarine Operations in World War II (US Naval Institute Press, June 1949).

Both the most devout and more moderate Luddites will have to gasp on this one.

Value comes from embracing and managing risk. An absence of risk generally equates to an absence of value. But value must be measured, and the results, good and bad, must be analyzed for enterprise learning and to enhance future business developments, particularly with regard to developing more robust and complete business cases and promoting better-informed decision making for the future. A more positive and structured approach to enterprise governance of IT will help ensure the delivery of value. This is best achieved by building on what you have.

In my last Advisor (see "How The Checklist Manifesto Breaks Down Problems," 10 February 2010), I recommended the book The Checklist Manifesto -- How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande and promised to draw some parallels

Businesses and governments collect a large amount of personal information, some of it quite sensitive, about their clients, employees, patients, and citizens. At the same time, a random scan of media reports on any given day will find multiple stories of personal data lost by or stolen from corporations and governments.

A meeting was held at Motorola near Chicago several years ago, and nobody came. Well, almost nobody -- one guy did turn up. It was a good meeting, and several important decisions were made. Sandeep in Bangalore, India, dialed in, and so did Pat in Cork, Ireland, and Yaron in Tel Aviv, Israel.

I've noticed a growing interest by end-user organizations in using data mining technology -- particularly for predictive customer analytics. Several trends account for this. First, organizations now find themselves with so much data that they are looking for ways to capitalize on this valuable resource.

In 1980, Michael Porter wrote in his classic book Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors that there are two generic strategies for companies competing in broad markets.

In this series of Advisors, I'm exploring some typical problems traditionally trained managers run into when their organization starts to use agile (see "Hidden Pitfalls of Agile: Self-Organization," 14 January 2010, "Hidden Pitfalls of Agile: User Contact

My 16 April 2009 Trends Advisor, "As the 'Net Kills Newspapers, Who Pays for Free?" received more comments than most. It raised the question: who pays for journalism and research when advertising disappears?

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.