Category: Management

The Sessions paper — an analytical critique »

[cross-posted from brucefwebster.com]
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 [...]

Coping with the economic downturn »

[Cross-posted from brucefwebster.com]
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..

Hanging on to your IT staff »

I’ve written previously about the “Dead Sea effect“, in which your best IT engineers and managers leave over time, leaving behind an IT staff that is slowly becoming less competent and effective. Obviously, to counteract the Dead Sea effect, you want to hold onto your best IT people.
My two latest Baseline columns talk about ways [...]

Two new Baseline columns up »

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 IT project and yet still nickle-and-dime their software quality assurance (SQA) effort. It doesn’t help that SQA personnel are pretty much [...]

“Inside-Out”: IEEE presentation in Longmont (09/02/08) »

On September 2nd, I’ll be speaking at a meeting of the Denver IEEE Reliability Society. It will be held at 5:30 pm in the Seagate Building in Longmont (CO), on Nelson Road between 75th Rd and Airport Rd.
Here’s my abstract of the talk:
INSIDE-OUT: Organizations too often treat software reliability as an ‘after the fact’ consideration, [...]