Clearly, the US economy is beginning to gain momentum after about 18 months of very slow growth. Companies are reporting profits and buying new inventory, and consumers are increasing their spending. The recovery has taken a while, but it now seems to be fully underway -- or is it? The growth in jobs is picking up, but at a slower rate than normal for such a period.

"Can-do thinking makes risk management impossible. Since acknowledging real risk is defeatism, the risk management function in a can-do organization is restricted to dealing with those smallish risks that can be mitigated by quick action. That means you confront all the risks except the ones that really matter." (Tom DeMarco, Why Does Software Cost So Much? .)

Offshore outsourcing is a big deal these days, especially in the IT field. And because I made dire predictions about the phenomenon in a 1992 book entitled Decline and Fall of the American Programmer , I've been getting lots of phone calls from curious journalists and unemployed programmers lately.

In an ideal world, enterprise architecture would be defined within a well-articulated business vision and business strategy. These would provide the focus and context to the IT strategy and to the IT organization as a whole, particularly to the enterprise architecture.

Disparity of the data resource in most public- and private-sector organizations is a truism. Data disparity arises for the following reasons:

When outsourcing application development, there are a few things you can do to reduce your risks through the vendor selection process. For a start, it is easy to fall prey to comparing contractors on a cost-only basis. While cost is important, it should not be treated separately from, say, a contractor's use of proprietary technology and its position in the marketplace.

Many of us today believe that an agile methodology provides benefits in improved code quality, better fit to requirements, and lower risk of failure. However, a common criticism leveled at this approach is that the path of development may meander, involving rework due to a lack of up-front requirements and architecture definition.

At the beginning of October, Siebel systems announced that it will offer its customer relationship management (CRM) modules as Web services, as part of IBM's OnDemand program.

I was recently commissioned to assist a development team in making some technical decisions that would help them migrate to .NET. Meeting with the developers briefly beforehand allowed me to understand some of their issues.