The story of the shoemaker's children having no shoes of their own continues to be analogous to IT organizations that do not leverage software tools to accelerate and enhance the quality of their work. Automating IT is the next step in the evolutionary growth of a field that has automated virtually every other field.

The rise of agile methodologies has brought a lot of dispute and confusion into the IT community.

A new report from the research firm of Computer Economics indicates that the worldwide cost of computer viruses during the first eight months of this year is US $10.7 billion. Roughly $2.6 billion of this figure is associated with the Code Red computer worm, which many security experts still believe originated from China.

Despite what slick brochures and vendor representatives will tell you, not all tests can be automated.

"Collaboration without process is chaos, and process without automation is unrealistic," says Sky Basu, founder and CEO of speeDEV (http://www.speedev.com), a small (the company was formed in 1994, but released the first product, speeDEV, in 2000) company that has entered the collaborative software tool market.

As the availability of large amounts of information increases, companies' abilities to exploit that information for business purposes becomes proportional to the level of quality of the data. When bad data items are injected into a system, there are significant impacts, all of which cut into profitability.

This is my last Advisor during the summer vacation season here in California. Next week, most of my readers will be back in the office, thinking about enterprise architecture issues and other weighty business topics. Before summer is over entirely, however, I thought you might like to know about my birthday gift to myself: a Kyocera.

One step you might consider adding to your development process is brief project reviews. I like to imagine it takes skill and experience to recognize some of the more subtle problems early, but the fundamentals of a review are actually pretty straightforward. What follows is a quick checklist of questions you can use to assess the general health of your project and identify areas that might need some attention.

Say goodbye to those extension cords.

A sample product vision statement:

I had lunch not too long ago with a mid-level manager at a defense contractor. He was interested in how my e-commerce research might apply to his organizational issues.

Recently, I worked with a team lead to assist him in pulling together a project plan for completing some system enhancements. The project team that was to be involved had complained that previous releases had unrealistic schedules and commitments, required too much overtime, and lacked a clear work plan. This time, we were hoping to tackle some of these issues by conducting some additional up-front planning.