I live and work in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, USA. On 24 October, authorities arrested two suspects in the case of the DC sniper. These suspects alledgedly shot 13 people (10 fatally).

At the end of October, Borland Software announced that it had agreed to buy TogetherSoft Corp. for $82.5 million in cash and a little over nine million shares of Borland common stock. The entire transaction is valued at $185 million, based on Borland's closing price per share of $11.34 on 29 October.

The art of imagination is clearly out of vogue in today's business environment. Though there may be a few examples of isolated pockets of individuals dancing out of the box, a majority of the business community is operating within the constraints of four bleak walls and is restricted by an ever-tightening budgetary straightjacket.

My wife and I have a technique we use to ensure that we stay focused on completing our household to-do list. We throw a party.

One of the wise decisions the Object Management Group (OMG) made when it standardized on UML in the late 1990s was to focus only on notation and to ignore specific methodological issues. That kept UML independent of any specific methodology, and it provided time for methodologies to evolve.

Often IT managers are unwilling or unable to use one of their most powerful management tools -- asking for help.

You can tell a lot about a company by the discipline it practices [1]. Some companies perform due diligence, while others make decisions based on what the brother-in-law thinks. There are also consultants who will tell you how to think -- for a price, of course.