Many development project schedules I see end with a triumphant milestone activity called something like "Go Live." Note that I said "end with," not "include."

Nicholas Carr's article, "IT Doesn't Matter," in the May 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review, continues to generate a lot of heated discussion because of its thesis, which basically proposes that information technology is becoming so commonplace that it really doesn't offer companies much strategic advantage. Carr covered a number of issues associated with the commoditization of IT, but the following quote gives a pretty good idea of where he is coming from:

There are three major forces driving the need for a new paradigm of project management.

Driving force 1: a power shift. The use and abuse of expert power by people in IT has resulted in a major shift of the control within the industry back into the business areas. In most organizations, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of business experts' involvement and ownership in the project development process and its management.

In today's -- we hope -- improving economy, business executives are interested in getting the greatest value for their expenditures and in reducing overall costs. With the emphasis on innovation and creativity, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that agile project management and software development (APMSD) can have a dramatic impact on the bottom line.

During the 1980s, my biggest client was a telephone company. I remember one day talking to a top executive with this company about what he considered to be his most serious technology problem. He didn't even think about it, he just blurted out: "The billing system by a long ways. We can create new telecommunication products much faster than we can figure out how to bill for them."

In the mid-1990s, a company named Zeos assembled PCs in my home state of Minnesota. I was impressed when Zeos was named as a finalist for the Malcolm Baldrige Award because competing for this quality award is more or less the equivalent of a software company trying to reach CMM Level 5.

Over the past few years, enterprise and operational risk management activities in many sectors have evolved from information gathering to a functional discipline with dedicated staff using established formal policies and both quantitative and qualitative procedures.

While the world has been in the economic doldrums and most IT companies have been reporting lousy earnings, IBM Software Division has been buying and innovating. It has been interesting to watch IBM execute this strategy, drawing on its deep cash reserves, while others simply hunker down and wait for the wind to fill their sails again.