"Cut off their hands," sums up Alistair Cockburn's approach to software development. This admittedly graphic metaphor, Cockburn explains, comes from the early 1600s writing of Miyamoto Musashi, a Japanese samurai who was never defeated in a duel. Musashi's book on sword fighting techniques focuses on doing something in deadly earnest -- nothing minutely superfluous allowed.

In IT, we often reflexively retreat into our own world, even when it makes more sense to stay open to the rest of the business. Taking on the entire burden for developing and implementing a sourcing strategy is an example of this mistake. Keeping the business involved from the earliest planning through day-to-day execution not only makes sense, it also produces better results.

E-commerce is powered by an insatiable need for demographic, socioeconomic, and personal information to focus in on customers. Such information is beginning to acquire enormous financial value -- a new form of currency in the new e-economy. However, its use and storage is vulnerable to abuse, the potential for which grows daily.

"It takes longer to turn a good idea into good software than it should," Eric Lander claimed in an interview with Computerworld (4 January 1999). Lander is a pure mathematician who has been working on the Human Genome Project for many years. We all have our troubles getting the software we use to work smoothly. Lander's work is undoubtedly far more difficult than what most of us encounter.

"The project manager is the linchpin in the horizontal/vertical organizations we're creating."

As I suggested in last week's column, the uncertain state of the US economy "doesn't mean that [companies will] stop spending money on IT altogether, but it could mean a slower growth, or even a small decline." I'm not usually narcissistic enough to quote my own words, but I think it's important for ALL of us to be very careful with the words that we use to describe IT spending plans and strategies.

As every software architect knows, it's dangerous to write off any computer technology. A new technology comes along and it seems certain that older technologies will die. Then, the older technology takes a new twist, and there it is again -- the latest "New Thing" that everyone is talking about.

Despite the sagging NASDAQ, things at a lot of dot-coms I have visited recently seem to humming happily, frantically along. There are countless meetings, never enough conference rooms, hurried conferences on the way to those meetings, and the really frantic are zipping by on those ubiquitous, obnoxious little scooters.

As I write, the IT-heavy NASDAQ staggers sluggishly near 2,500. After a riotous party that saw the index climb to more than 5,000, a stiff hangover is setting in. Its effect winds through the economy, a growing force that is not yet fully reckoned. Many IT employees, their savings plans brimming with company stock, are less wealthy than they were 10 months ago when they splurged on an upscale SUV.

The drawn-out disputes in Florida about the US presidential election have come to a close. Don't worry, this article is not a commentary on US democracy, nor a recommendation for electronic voting. Cutter Consortium Technology Council Fellow Ed Yourdon has already discussed that, asking, "Will election chaos lead to technology-based voting changes? ...

Have you ever been associated with a project where the execution was flawless, but yet you were unable to achieve the business objectives? I have -- as a member of a cross-functional project team, whose charter was to design an electronic business solution for a retailer with hundreds of stores across the Midwestern US.

A couple weeks ago, I received an intriguing e-mail from a total stranger in the northwestern US:

Business uncertainty, accentuated by the recent dot-com failures, seems to be having a paralyzing effect on businesses. The ambivalence between nurturing old business lines and heavy investment in new ones has led to a technological impasse in many organizations. In the name of uncertainty -- or unexpectedly magnified bottom-line deficiencies -- strategy implementations are being halted.