Two years ago when I wrote an Advisor about Woehlke's Law: nothing gets done till nothing gets done (see "Woehlke's Law: Nothing Gets Done Till Nothing Gets Done," 21 July 2005), it never really occurred to me that there actually was a Richard Woehlke alive and well and living in New England or that one day he'd cho

"Any publicity is good publicity" is an old adage that US Airways has recently had an opportunity to put to a test. In mid-February, an ice storm on the US eastern seaboard grounded the airline, leaving tens of thousands of passengers stranded and creating mountains of lost luggage at US Airways hubs, especially Philadelphia.

One of my clients is building a new stock market Web site. The site is primarily centered on the display of information. Like many projects, the company is in a rush and doesn't want to spend a lot of money. We evaluated several different approaches and finally settled on Ruby on Rails.

This week we noticed an article in Federal Computer Week (12 March 2007, pp. 62-63) that describes how US federal agency computer projects can be on several "watch" lists. The article notes that the "Office of Management and Budget lists 246 business cases ... on its ... Watch List."

To better understand what factors actually play a role in the sourcing decision offshore, I have discussed this issue in interviews with over 60 representatives of client firms in the US as well as IT services vendor firms and captive units in India, Russia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, and Armenia. From the data I collected, two decision criteria emerged as critical in making the sourcing choice:

If you are reading this, you probably manage an organization of people. How well do you manage? Would you like to have a simple, quantified measure of manager effectiveness? I think I may have discovered one, so read on.

I recently had a conversation with a colleague named Rob. Rob and I used to work together in another organization -- call it Office C. Rob left Office C several months ago, as did I a couple of weeks ago.

Let's start by examining the mission (or purpose) of information technology by asking, "What is the business purpose of the IT department in your company?" Can you answer this question? Is your answer similar to the answers of the CEO and CFO?

According to findings from a recent Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in March 2007) of 119 end-user organizations based worldwide that I've been analyzing, many organizations are now facing the need to consolidate disparate data marts and data warehouses.

In the dark, dim days when I was a child, people used mostly black telephones connected to the wall by a wire. They placed calls using a rotary dial. Then came colored phones with push buttons, wireless phones, cellular phones, and VoIP. All of this seemed to happen in the blink of an eye, but it has been at least 30 years. And there's a lot more to come.

In my last Advisor ("Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 8: Keys for Creating Designer Norms in Teams," 1 March 2007), I told you about how to make and keep operating agreements that develop into a set of custom-designed norms and support a team in achieving high performance.

The recent switchover to Daylight Savings Time in the US was a challenge for those who live in the States, but in many ways, it was even more of a headache for our allies overseas. Those of us who deal with enterprises outside the US have the unpleasant challenge of trying to figure out what time it is where.

The most significant component of sourcing is people, or the workforce, and organizations are moving toward a more global workforce to reap the benefits of sourcing. Obviously, the question that arises next is: how do we assemble our global workforce? More importantly, how much does the cultural diversity of our workforce matter?

Last fall, I discussed some of the main ideas underlying the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts (see "Enterprise 2.0: Hip or Hype?" 25 October 2006, and "Beyond the Hype: Enterprise 2.0 Considerations," 22 November 2006).

collaboration = innovation

A best practice is to prevent a privacy incident from occurring in the first place. Do this by first identifying current privacy exposures and second by prioritizing how to address them. However, when a privacy incident occurs, resolve the issues as quickly as possible by following your established incident response procedures and then analyzing the incident.

Wikipedia describes master data management (MDM) as follows:

My initial analysis of the results of a Cutter Consortium BI and data warehousing survey conducted this month (March 2007) of 119 end-user organizations (based worldwide) indicates that the use of real-time (or near-real time) data warehouse updating practices is increasing.

Publications like Business 2.0, Fast Company, and even Business Week are all writing about Web 2.0 -- the new net and the next digital gold rush. What the hell is going on now? Is this another bubble? Will Web 2.0 companies crash and burn like their parents?

In previous Advisors (see "A Recipe for Success," 8 February 2007, "A Recipe for Success, Part 2," 15 February 2007, and "A Recipe for Success, Part 3," 8 March 2007), I introduced

Are organizations fully capable of understanding the possible risks to value creation from technology investment in the absence of an economic value analysis of that technology? Wal-Mart's tale of RFID tag deployment is illuminating.

A new world order has been evolving since around 1990 or so, and we in the IT industry have responded to it with such efforts, fads, buzzwords, and new technologies as reengineering, the Internet, outsourcing, optimization, virtualization, and many others. However, we really have not seen the changes enabled by these new technologies and evolving global business needs holistically -- as a call for new ways of doing business -- and we certainly have not rallied ourselves as a profession to rethink the way we extract value from technology in our businesses.

If you follow astrology, you know that Gemini is the sign of the twins. And it's often said that Gemini have two sides: their good side and the other side -- the evil twin, which emerges at unexpected times, with undesirable results. I don't know if this is generally true about Gemini, but it is often true about other complex things.

We continue to confront a basic problem in IT management: business managers aren't much interested in participating in prioritization, alignment, and planning exercises for IT. This is particularly true for business-unit managers who are components of a multi-line-of-business corporation. While the corporate CFO, and possibly the CEO, do worry about IT costs, individual business unit managers who consume IT services simply aren't interested.

No doubt, like many other practitioners, you have indoctrinated yourself with the mantra that transformation and innovation are the two true key cornerstones of your success. You may have recognized that it is not enough for your company simply to be efficient in order to stay ahead of your competitors.

Imagine sitting in the park on a nice summer day, and a flock of birds sweeps the sky. One moment they are circling, another they dart to the left or drop to the ground. Each move is so beautiful that it appears choreographed. Furthermore, the movements of the flock seem smoother than those of any one bird in the flock. Yet, the flock has no high-level controller or even a lead bird.