Getting old isn't much fun, but it occasionally has some benefits -- one of which is the experience of "déjà vu all over again." In the IT industry, as in most other walks of life, the same problems, trends, fads, and Eureka!-style discoveries seem to occur about once a decade.

A year or two ago, dot-coms could do no wrong. They were new-breed companies, or so we were told; the next stage in business evolution, as far advanced over industrial-age firms as homo sapiens were above their primitive primate ancestors. This was, of course, nonsense.

Project managers (PMs) often complain that they are continually being surprised by the unexpected. A common gripe: "If I had known about the situation even a month ago, the whole thing could have easily been resolved. Now, my only options are bad and worse. Why doesn't anyone ever tell me about these things when I can do something about them?"

Change control boards (CCBs), a recommended traditional project management practice, should really be labeled change resistance boards. Forms are filled out, approvals are made, and then periodically the CCB meets to review a long list of changes.

At least once a year, I find myself being bombarded by a new IT buzzword that makes no sense to me -- or one that seems far less exciting and revolutionary than the media hype would have us believe. The buzzword I'm struggling with at the moment is Microsoft's ".NET" initiative.

Conferences, trade journals, and the Internet provide valuable information on vendor products and services. I always find it interesting, however, that many vendors believe their marketing hype is more highly valued than a good reference from a client or customer who has used their product or service. It is not. Customers provide you with the real story.

I've been involved in a dozen discussions in the past two months on the nature of e-business. In some cases, I've talked with non-IS people, and the discussion often revolves around the failure of the dot.coms and what that means about the future of e-business. The other conversations have been with IS folks and those conversations are, in many ways, more interesting to me.

"It only happens with pistachio ice cream," the exasperated man explained. "The car starts fine when I buy vanilla or chocolate ice cream, but it never starts when I buy pistachio."

The analysis of the desirability of outsourcing usually follows an approach similar to the phased approach for developing information systems.

One of the interesting presentations at the Object Management Group's (OMG) E-Business Application Integration (EAI) workshop in Orlando, Florida, USA, in January was given by Colonel Lawrence Sweeney, US Air Force. Sweeney is the joint program manager of the Department of Defense's (DOD) Space and Naval Warfare Information Technology Center (SPAWAR ITC) project.

Late last year, I wrote an article about ensuring appropriate business cases exist for projects (" Benefits: Not As Intangible As You Think!", Cutter IT E-Mail Advisor, 22 November 2000).

When two of IBM's biggest competitors, Amdahl and Hitachi, announced they were withdrawing from the mainframe market, Cutter Consortium decided to look into the current demand of mainframes.

A variant of a quote from Dwight Eisenhower goes something like: the value of the plan is not in the plan itself, but in the planning. As we think about putting together good sourcing activities -- whether acquiring a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) package, outsourcing some development work, or outsourcing a whole IT organization -- planning is critical.

With all of the gloomy stories about the dot-com collapse, you might get the impression that the high-tech jobs associated with all of those failed companies have vanished. If pets.com and this.com and that.com have all gone bankrupt, then will we really need all of those Java programmers? If the dot-com industry has laid off 20,000-30,000 people in the past year, are they all still unemployed?

Well, not a startup exactly.

I have recently been closely involved with an organization that is incubating a new Web-based service business within a much larger company. An "internal startup," if you like.