No silver bullets. Really!

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 describes [...]

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The CIO and the fine art of vendor negotiation

“Don’t write about that,” I’ve been told by several colleagues, when I’ve mentioned that I was working on a post about how best, as the senior technology executive, to negotiate with vendors.  “You’ll give away all your tricks!” they’ve said. Well, actually, no.  Here’s the main trick: this particular CIO doesn’t have any “tricks”, if by [...]

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IT transparency is good. But how transparent should you be?

A few years back, I had an extremely surprising and unpleasant experience as CTO. The director of my Program Management Office ran a weekly status meeting for project stakeholders, where we’d all methodically go through the current project portfolio, in order to communicate on issues, gather necessary feedback, and align everyone’s expectations. I typically attended [...]

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Complexity isn’t simple: multiple causes of IT failure

Roger Sessions recently published a white paper on IT complexity and its role in IT project failure: “The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity”.  It’s certainly possible to quarrel with bits and pieces of his analysis, and thereby tweak his numbers, but the overall thrust remains undeniable: IT failures are costing the world incredible amounts [...]

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Fits and starts: staying “tech savvy” as a CIO

Just a quick, personal post this time: I was recently interviewed by CIO Magazine on the topic of “How CIOs Can Stay Tech-Savvy“.  Since (as is normal) only a portion of my conversation with the reporter actually made it into the article, I thought I’d expand briefly on the topic here. My remarks were two-fold, [...]

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“Refuse to lose”: how executive pressure contributes to IT failure

“We went live before the system was ready”.  It’s a common excuse/explanation that I hear from IT people when they tell war stories about system launches that failed miserably. Implicit (and sometimes explicit) is the add-on statement: “and we told them so beforehand, too.” There are obviously many things (and many parts of the org [...]

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Conventional wisdom that fails for IT

I’ve done several posts featuring what I call “Peterisms”, which are basically aphorisms I’ve adopted that encapsulate hard-earned IT lessons. Let’s turn it around this time, and talk about two sayings that sound equally folksy-sensible, and that I hear again and again, but which I feel are actually dangerous to apply to information technology work. [...]

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Cloud computing: misunderstood, but really not that complicated a concept

Consider these statements: Baseball is a game where the pitcher throws to the catcher. An iPhone is a device that lets you call anywhere in the world. The Grand Canyon is a tourist attraction in Arizona You’ll have noticed that these statements aren’t wrong, per se. But they still take you aback, don’t they? They [...]

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