A Canadian radio talk-show host called me a few days ago, asking if I would participate in a "live" debate about the Y2000 problem. She had found a programmer who was willing to argue that Y2000 would be "no big deal," and she was hoping that I would articulate the gloom-and-doom, "end of the world" position. I decided not to participate, largely because of the confusion I thought it would create in the minds of the audience.

Years ago, one of my children misbehaved at the dinner table in a rather obnoxious way. As punishment, I told him he would have no dessert and that he would be confined to his bedroom for the rest of the evening.

Crestfallen, my son got down from the table -- and then stopped to ask if it would be acceptable to spend the rest of the evening in my bedroom, rather than his. Taken by surprise, I asked for an explanation.

So much of IT's job is communication. What kind of communications score would you give your organization and yourself? Are you PowerPoint aficionados? Can you take complicated concepts and distill them into coherent, meaningful analyses and recommendations?

On a cross-country plane ride last week, I had a chance to read through the October issue of one of my favorite technical magazines, Software Development. I know many of the editors, writers, and columnists personally, and I've had the pleasure of contributing my own articles to the magazine over the past several years. It's not as dense, academic, or theoretical as the IEEE and ACM journals, but it's always filled with good, solid, technical material.

There are three possible ways the software talent shortage can end:

Richard Dué, who contributes to Cutter IT Journal from time to time, recently sent me the article that follows. It indeed piqued my interest. I'd like to know what you think.

I was chatting recently with a new consulting client about the software project that he had just undertaken, suggesting to him that the success of the project would depend less on object-oriented methodology and RAD (rapid application development) tools than on the effectiveness of the project team that had been assigned to work on it.

He looked at me blankly. "Team?" he asked, incredulously. "I don't have a team. At best, it's a committee; at worst, it's a herd of cats."

What if an auditor walked into your office and instead of asking the silly questions auditors often ask, presented you with a set of "alignment" questions? The audit objective is to determine if you're spending too much or too little, wisely or stupidly. Could you answer the following questions?

At the tender age of 24, I was nominated by the board of directors of my company to be an officer. If the office they were proposing had been President or Vice President it would have been something to write home about, but it wasn't. What they wanted me to become was Corporate Secretary.

One of the most important alignment areas is people. We all have them. We all need them. We all work to keep the good ones. But what is "talent" today?

Reading through a recent issue of Computerworld, I couldn't help thinking of Yogi Berra's refrain about "deja vu all over again." Salaries are up, IT costs are rising, the Web is everywhere. Outsourcing continues -- to Bulgaria now, of all places -- and every hardware and software vendor seems to have a dazzling new product guaranteed to cure whatever ails us.

Some organizations have good experiences with outsourcing, and some have disastrous ones. While there are all sorts of reasons why outsourcing deals go south, there are a few steps you can take early on to improve the likelihood of a successful outsourcing experience.

Sooner or later, every IT organization experiences the unpleasant phenomenon of the "doomed" project. For obvious reasons, it's better to find out about these sooner rather than later, because it's better to kill the project before too many careers have been ruined and too much money has been wasted. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to tell whether the project has developed a fatal case of gangrene, and organizational politics often prevent a frank and open discussion of the situation.