Author Archive: bfwebster
Webster is Principal and Founder at at Bruce F. Webster & Associates, as well as an Adjunct Professor for the BYU Computer Science Department. He works with organizations to help them with troubled or failed information technology (IT) projects. He has also worked in several dozen legal cases as a consultant and as a testifying expert, both in the United States and Japan. He can be reached at 303.502.4141 or at bwebster@bfwa.com.
Getting technology lifecycles in sync
Different technologies age at different rates. Understanding the variations is the first step to managing them. One of the great challenges you face as an IT manager is selecting the right technology for a given project, for a specific department, or for your organization as a whole. That technology may be anything from an end-user […]
The Gartner Hype Cycle, 2013
Barry Ritholtz, over at the always-worth-reading The Big Picture, posts the latest “hype cycle” from Gartner and where current proposed/emerging/developing technologies stand. I wasn’t familiar with Gartner’s stages of hype (as shown along the bottom of the chart), but they’re very useful. The overall concept meshes well with an article I wrote back in 2009 for […]
Second-class software quality in major IT projects
Many years ago, software-engineering guru Gerald Weinberg famously said that if builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. I’d like to say that efforts at software quality have improved since he first said that, and in many organizations they have. On the other hand, […]
The Unhappy Valley: customized COTS between “buy” and “build”
In response to my post yesterday on buy vs. build, Geoff asked a very important question: I’d be interested to get your opinion on the degree of customisation that COTS packages can realistically handle. I’ve seen several systems that started out as customised COTS, but eventually departed so far from the vanilla functionality that we […]
Buying vs. building software applications: the eternal dilemma
Some years back, an IT colleague of mine mentioned a conflict at a corporation where he was working at the time. The corporation had a mission-critical application deployed across a large number of workstations. The corporate employees who used this application largely used it and nothing else all day long at dedicated workstations. The application […]