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.

In a recent survey by Cutter Consortium of more than 100 software development organizations of varied sizes, the most common method of software estimation was -- drum roll please -- "gut feel." People would pick a number for cost and schedule estimates based on rough judgment of experienced developers nearly 50% of the time.

How effective is your IT department at servicing its clients? Many CIOs spend a lot of time and money trying to answer this question. They sort through reams of data from call tracking, help desk, and project management systems to help them quantify service levels.

Dear Steve,

Let me assure you that the following relates to management.

This week's Advisor is about distance learning, one of my favorite subjects and one of my favorite pursuits. Living as I do -- off the beaten track -- the ability to access information makes it possible for me to remain current on a lot of things. In my case, as with billions of other people who live off the beaten track, learning at a distance is wonderful and amazing.

The year 2003 is shaping up to be the one in which companies will decide whether to embrace open source software or fail to adopt it and allow Microsoft to extend its control of desktop deep into the enterprise.

One of the biggest challenges of systems development is getting to the "root" of business requirements and associated rules. Often, I find that when moving from an existing system to a new one, business area representatives often present existing "workarounds" as business rules. As systems specialists, we need to recognize these false requirements and clarify the true business needs.