Top 25: most popular posts on this blog

Note: not in order of popularity

IT consumerization, the cloud, and the alleged death of the CIO

Tweet As with just about any area, IT is a discipline subject to fads and memes, “received truths” that seem to arise in the press or the blogosphere and then ricochet around the echo chamber until they sound plausible even to skeptics. A number of these roll across my Twitter stream every day. But one [...]

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Novels of IT, Part 2: Haunting the CEO

Tweet Last time, I introduced this series by pointing out that reading what I call “novels of IT” could serve a few very useful purposes for those of us who work in and around information technology.  In fact, I presented a number of criteria that come to mind when answering the implicit question of why [...]

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Can a CIO be successful without IT experience? Define your terms!

Tweet Yes, it’s déjà vu: certain topics crop up again and again on IT-related blogs. The age-old question: does a CIO really need to have IT experience?  I’ve touched upon this before, here and here, but it’s time for a full column covering the standard arguments posed in this debate. I’ve gone through every article I [...]

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Business impact and transparency: expressing system availability

Tweet “System availability was 99.83% last month!  That’s up from 99.75% the previous month!” Sounds kind of good, no? I mean, that’s a high number, right? Right? Actually, no.  It’s not a very useful number, in and of itself. In fact, I regard the publication of uptime metrics like that as a regrettable symptom of [...]

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One CIO’s “lessons learned” in managing others

Tweet Here’s a shocker: none of us has failed to fail at times. We’ve all screwed things up on occasion, and I’m no exception. And that’s especially true when it comes to managing others, which I believe is very much a learned skill.  In that spirit, there are a number of things about people management [...]

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The IT project failure dilemma: how to get early warnings

Tweet Thinking about how to prevent big system project failure has somehow always reminded me of the Will Rogers quote: “Don’t gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” In other words, with big projects, [...]

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Simple, more practical approaches to actual resource allocation

Tweet Anyone ever tell you that a simpler approach can often work better than a more complex one? Whoever it was, it probably wasn’t a project management software vendor.  But simplicity has its merits, and I’d like to point out a few of these when it comes to resource allocation. Project management, at its core, is [...]

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No silver bullets. Really!

Tweet Fred Brooks wrote a seminal essay in 1986, “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering“, a model of clear and cogent thinking that I consider to be required regular reading for anyone involved in information technology.  Despite the essay’s brilliance, and despite its wide promulgation and deserved fame, the phenomenon it [...]

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