One of the first aspects of getting a risk management practice into place is to find out what you actually do and don't know to sensitize yourself to any unjustified overconfidence. The initial step to understanding what we know and don't know is to discover what's controllable; i.e., what are the boundaries of the action, situation, or event that might be posing risk.

Part of my consulting practice is to perform assessments. Sometimes, those assessments discover misalignments between IT and the business. Misalignments show up as "problem" projects, "inadequate" testing, and other typical problems in IT. It turns out, though, that many IT misalignment problems can be solved by small changes in IT work processes.

It's been almost five years since Web services were first introduced, and it's probably a good time to check in on how they're doing and where they're going.

No business function is unaffected by IT. Because of its strategic and operational significance, the handing off of all IT matters -- including direction setting, investment decisions, and project management -- to a single IT department is no longer a viable option. Business managers must participate in using and managing the IT resource to advance the business.

Let us think for a moment about managing software professionals, and what this means in terms of contracts. Our starting point could be this: to manage someone is to have a contract with them.

An encouraging trend over the past several years has been the addition of IT-savvy directors to corporate boards. As shown in a 2004 analysis by public relations company Burson-Marsteller, after a corporation hires an IT-experienced director, the corporation experiences an average increase in its annual return of 6.4%. The reason appears to be that IT-knowledgeable directors are able to:

By some estimates, the amount of data generated each year is growing by as much as 40% to 60% for many organizations. Rapidly emerging technologies such as Auto-ID and the Electronic Product Code (EPC), combined with interactive sensor networks, will create even larger data streams of greater complexity. All indications are that the pace of data generation is accelerating.