Bruce F. Webster

My co-author and good friend Ruby Raley pointed me to this posting by Chris Curran over a possible new IT role, that of the “IT Czar”. Chris specifically uses a rebuilding-the-football-team analogy:
What is interesting about Holmgren’s hire is that it is modeled after Bill Parcells role at Miami – The Football Czar.  He’s not the [...]

Roger Sessions has published a white paper, “The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity” (PDF). It’s created a bit of a stir in tech circles, largely because Sessions estimates that “worldwide, we are already losing over USD 500 billion per month on IT failure, and the problem is getting worse” (page 1; emphasis in original). [...]

My newest Baseline column is up, and in it, I talk about technology lifecycles that can cause you grief:
Each technology is on its own product lifecycle, which may or may not match with your organization’s business and development lifecycles. In particular, there are certain cycle mismatch patterns that commonly occur in organizations looking to adopt [...]

I have written about the thermocline of truth, a phenomenon I have witnessed several times in large IT projects where the true status of the project (usually not good) gets blocked at a certain layer of management, slowly moving up the management chain and usually reaching the top just weeks before the scheduled release date.  [...]

I’m currently writing a series of columns for Baseline on how to deal with frozen or reduced IT budgets due to the current economic troubles. Here are the first two columns:

Performing IT Project Triage
Pulling the Plug on IT Project

Next up: how to deal with personnel issues.  ..bruce..