In this interview, Michael Mah addresses the importance of negotiation skills for today's IT manager. He touched upon this point in his Executive Report, " The Making of the Agile IT Executive."

Q: How did you get into the field of negotiation?

I've been writing on objects, components, and distributed component systems for a decade. In the course of that decade, I've watched objects evolve from a commercially new technology to the established way of developing software.

Even as we're in the midst of the rapid growth of Wi-Fi and 2.5G and 3G wireless data networking, we're already hearing about "the next big thing" in broadband and wireless networking: WiMAX and IEEE 802.20.

Often the executive board arrives at the conclusion that offshoring will result in improved quality or reduced costs -- or even both -- and mandates that the development of a system take place elsewhere. Yet project managers and technical staff of offshoring projects do not receive management support when it comes to making the project a success.

Most formal system development methodologies are focused on successful development and implementation of IT systems. Very few, if any, address the issue of how to discontinue failing or failed IT projects! It is almost as if the IT community considers it sacrilegious to acknowledge, let alone terminate, a failed or failing project.

As 2004 winds down, I want to comment one more time on a trend that I predict will grow in the year ahead and throughout the rest of this decade. I expect that large companies will become better at dividing business processes into two groups and maintaining those that are really vital while outsourcing those that are essentially "commodity processes."

Business continuity management (BCM) is a term used to describe the ability of an organization to provide uninterrupted business operations in the case of "extra-ordinary" operational risk events. Traditionally, BCM has concerned disaster-related events such as fires, floods, hurricanes, and so on, but with the advent of IT systems, such things as security breaches, system faults, or almost any event that could interrupt an organization's operations are also included in the BCM sphere.

I recently read an article in the Economist that talked about increased complexity in our lives. From new devices like mobile phones to previously simple devices like alarm clocks, we are constantly being exposed to more and more complexity. This is also the case with technology products and application development, and comes with a high cost in frustration and lost productivity.

About five years ago, Extreme Programming (XP) emerged as a software development methodology and became an alternative to the existing heavyweight and plan-driven approaches. While many have embraced XP, others view XP as heresy for defying established software engineering doctrine.

Agile software development and project management (ASDPM) is geared to managing uncertainty -- uncertainty related to "ends" (customer objectives and requirements) and uncertainty related to "means" (technology and people).