The other day, I broke a 12" x 12" x 1" pine board with my bare hand after listening to a 90-minute motivational talk about breaking barriers to achieve goals. As someone with martial arts training, I was less impressed with my own success than I was with the success of a 12-year-old in the group of parents and children.

At a recent IT conference, a colleague of mine who helps companies negotiate large-scale outsourcing deals posed a question to the audience. He mused, "Have we squeezed all the productivity there is to squeeze out of IT?"

I am not a confident cook. My approach at big dinners is to write down everything I want to make, assemble all the ingredients, orchestrate an appropriate set of dependencies (what needs to come out of the oven first, and so on) and then implement with the goal that everything be hot and on the table, hopefully edible, at the same time.

To be effective, business-IT alignment must be practiced as a continuous activity, with the business model being continuously adjusted to reflect changing conditions such as IT developments and market changes. As the business model changes, IT must adapt accordingly. Within this continuous process, complex problems are faced, and identifying the right decisions is difficult.

The recent news of Apple's financial problems makes it hard to resist pointing out that I predicted this three years ago when Steve Jobs became the temporary CEO of Apple. I would never advise anyone to make stock market decisions based on my predictions. The market jerks up and down as participants identify possible short-term gains or losses.

The open source software movement has been catapulted into the limelight over the last two years, as a series of successful projects have captured the attention of corporate America. For example, the Linux operating system, poster-child of the open source movement, took shape in 1991 alongside the GNU Project to develop a freely available operating system.

PDI may be the next EAI. Enterprise application integration (EAI) has become a major initiative for many companies. But reading through EAI articles and attending several EAI conferences reveals a major hole in the generic EAI models -- product development.

I have discovered a fatal disease that appears to afflict some organizations that try to practice risk management. This malady is an odd form of myopia. Projects infected with it can only see small problems. Large problems looming directly ahead, problems that would be in the center of any healthy project's field of vision, go completely unseen by the victims of this disease.

I suspect there were a lot of CIOs who frowned as they read in InformationWeek that 3Com is replacing its CIO with the head of its e-business unit. At the same time, the guy who headed up supply chain operations will become the new head of both supply chain operations and all product development, ousting the former head of product development.

Following the invention of the automobile, US car manufacturers dominated the world market for half a century before overseas suppliers challenged their leading position. Today, the majority of software tools and applications originate in the US. The software industry has now reached the half-century mark. Will history repeat itself with offshore developers overtaking this hot market? There are signs that this is a distinct possibility.

Ever since the term computer virus was invented, people have been plumbing the biological world for analogies and ideas to help prevent the spread and seriousness of "human-generated computer viruses." (I put all that in quotes to note that there is nothing necessarily "natural" in computer viruses, they're all manmade and evolve only from a human understanding point of view.

While the Open Source movement conjures up scary scenarios of "free software" for some and Microsoft-bashing for others, moving beyond the heavy rhetoric provides fresh insight into an emerging collaborative development model of software development.

Try this statement on for size:

Many of us have spent the last few weeks watching the twists and turns of the US presidential contest in Florida. Most of us now know more about the election laws of Florida than we know about those of our home state, and each day, it seems, the complexities multiply. Many Americans wonder if it will ever sort itself out.

Many project managers are finding their experiences in deploying e-business applications extremely frustrating. Proof-of-concept evolves rapidly into a pilot project, and before you know it, you are supporting a prototype application in production mode, interacting with back-end transactional systems.