Projects begin with high hopes and dreams, which gradually fade away as the quality of the software decays. This process cannot be inevitable. Where, how, when, and by whom should testing happen so that we can feel better about a system after a year -- better yet, after a decade -- rather than after a mere month?

One of the great problems of science is forgetting what we've learned. Most students of the history of science know that after the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam, much of ancient science was lost to Europe until the 13th century, when ancient Greek works reentered the scholarly world. In fact, much of what we know today as the Renaissance was, in fact, a rediscovery of earlier knowledge.

Here's a schizophrenic trend we need to understand: On the one hand, there are new collaborative business models that require speed and agility; but on the other, we're still laboring under "consensus management" practices that inhibit our ability to maneuver quickly. Is there a new trend emerging, one that collapses the distance between decisionmaking speed and consensus?

Most of us have witnessed or been involved in project decisions "gone wrong." This includes systems that go live before they are really ready, budget overruns that drain resources from other projects, and resource allocations that are made in the hopes of "getting the project done."

If your organization has crafted a winning business strategy but cannot implement it, or possesses superb implementation capability but has a vague and ill-defined business strategy, don't be surprised to find that a business-IT misalignment problem exists.

A group of packaged application vendors, including Siebel, SAP, UpShot, Avaya, Knowlagent, and PeopleSoft, is currently running a special advertising section on customer relationship management (see CRM).

Recently I was asked a puzzling question: "In a chaotic software development environment, what's the single most important practice for process improvement? If you could recommend just one practice for a 'level zero' environment, what would it be?"