I had the pleasure of visiting New Zealand this week to attend the annual Software Developer's conference, which attracts some of the best IT gurus in the world. This is my fourth visit to New Zealand since 1990, and while I still haven't had a chance to drive around the country and see the spectacular scenery, I always come away with some new insights and perspectives on software development.

If you read the popular press, you might think the e-business trend has come to an end. Amazon.com and Cisco each warned analysts that they might not meet their numbers. At the same time, Nike complained that its new supply chain system had actually caused it to miss its numbers for the last quarter.

When the dirt is finally revealed on some political scandal, people often ask why the story did not emerge earlier. The answer is that the questioner did not get a revealing answer because he or she did not ask the right question.

"The 'gay index' is the leading predictor of a city's ability to attract and retain knowledge workers," claimed Richard Florida, founder and director of the Software Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University in the January 2001 issue of Fast Company magazine. High-technology, talented people want to work in organizational environments that are tolerant, open to diversity, and supportive of others from all walks of life.

The Object Management Group (OMG) has just ended another technical meeting. Usually, these meetings are devoted to committee work on various standards that the OMG is adopting. In this case, however, something rather momentous happened. The OMG has begun the formal process of changing its entire orientation.

Simply put, eXtreme Modeling (XM) is a collection of values, principles, and practices for modeling software. XM addresses the fundamental issue of how you model and document a system in the most effective manner possible. XM is an agile methodology built on the eXtreme Programming (XP) software process.

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.