Business
IT retrenchment: performing IT project triage
The on-going economic turmoil in the U.S. and global economies over the past several years continues to force many organizations to freeze, trim or even dramatically slash internal budgets. If you’re an experienced IT manager, you already know that your budget may be among the first to be affected. And that means making hard choices, […]
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 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 […]
The Many-Headed Beast on the Three-Legged Stool
Within a given organization — corporate or governmental — three separate groups exist that can determine the success or failure of your IT project. This is true whether you’re a senior IT project manager within that organization, a consulting firm developing or re-engineering a system for that organization or an external vendor trying to sell […]
Capital One locks out Quicken — but for how long? [UPDATED: not for long]
[UPDATE 11/08/12: Sometime in the past few weeks, the problem went away. I assume Capital One and/or Quicken came to whatever decisions they needed in order to allow automatic downloads once again.] I have a few Capital One credit cards — have had them for years. I use Quicken to track my finances and have […]