Development
A new proposed role — the “IT Czar”
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 […]
Fireflies, conveyor belts, and landfills
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 […]
The thermocline of innovation (NASA, again)
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. […]
Systems doomed to fail: ULTra mass transit
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 […]
Two new columns up at Baseline
Obviously, I’ve been slow in posting here, since I’ve had two new columns go up at Baseline since I last posted. The first column, “Second Class Software Quality for Major IT Projects”, talks about the curious fact that organizations are willing to spend millions, tens of millions, even hundred of millions of dollars on major […]