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.