About a year ago, after I attended the 2002 Unisys financial analysts conference, I wrote about Unisys' plans to use the Object Management Group's (OMG) Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in application development and business process outsourcing. I just got back from the 2003 version of the conference and can report that Unisys has made great progress and is gearing up for a major push.

In consulting arrangements, there is nothing more challenging than developing a project estimate that both the client and vendor can work from. Yet there is really not much that is more important to achieve. A recent situation I faced sheds some light on the challenges this can bring.

I recently stumbled across something in the opinion section of one of the major computer trade magazines. The author was trying to explain why neither object nor component reuse had quite lived up to expectations. Object (component-based) development has always been sold on the following assumptions:

I recently stumbled across something in the opinion section of one of the major computer trade magazines. The author was trying to explain why neither object nor component reuse had quite lived up to expectations. Object (component-based) development has always been sold on the following assumptions:

What is the purpose of alignment in an outsourcing engagement? At the highest level, it means ensuring that the strategies pursued by the outsourcing engagement are in line with corporate goals. At the lowest level, it means making sure that the right tasks are performed, at the right time, in the right order of priority.

A reader recently asked me about the extent to which companies are applying BI and some of the key reasons that are driving them to do so. I thought I'd make these questions the topic of this week's Advisor.

In the course of the past year, I have written quite a bit on the Object Management Group's (OMG) Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The OMG's initiative is really only a year and a half old, and it is already gathering significant attention at large companies. In essence, MDA is a new approach to software development that blends together a number of powerful technologies.

According to the tired old joke, a consultant is someone you pay to look at your watch so that he or she can tell you what time it is. As a consultant, I would agree with this analogy only so far as to say that if the client has grown so accustomed to looking at his or her watch that he or she has forgotten how to read it, then yes, it is accurate.

Software development is a risky business. You might think, therefore, that the people who do such work -- as well as those who pay for it and depend upon its eventual successful completion -- would be vigilantly concerned with risks; they would pay obsessive attention to each and every one of the factors that might cause failure. But such is not always the case in IT today. A running joke in our industry is that present-day projects fail for many of the same reasons that similar projects failed years ago.