Bruce F. Webster

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 review of Why New Systems Fail by Phil Simon is now up on Slashdot. Here’s the opening paragraph: Over the last forty years, a small set of classic works on risks and pitfalls in software engineering and IT project management have been published and remained in print. The authors are well known, or should [...]

Ray Kurzweil is a very well-known techno-futurist whose main focus has been the coming of artificial sentience.  His 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, contains a series of chapters prediction computer technology in successive decades (2009, 2019, etc.). Well, we’re now entering 2009, and it’s worth looking at his 2009 predictions (hat tip to [...]

Over at Futurismic (one of my daily science blog reads) is this post about the ULTra light transit system.  The system is quite clever and takes a demand-based (vs. a schedule-based) approach to transit. But as you watch the accompanying video, ask yourself: why will the ULTra system likely never grow beyond small, custom installations [...]

My latest Baseline column  is up, and it talks about why you should read these five books now, if you haven’t already. And if you have read them, you should probably re-read them.  ..bruce..