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...
View ArticleFireflies, conveyor belts, and landfill
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...
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Why Ballmer Failed
Derek Thompson over at the Atlantic has put together a very useful, brief article outlining what has happened at Microsoft under Steve Ballmer’s watch. Most significant is this graph: That tells the...
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Why government IT projects are so prone to failure or overruns
Joseph Marks over at Government Executive Magazine has an excellent article on the propensity of government IT projects to having significant cost/schedule overruns or to fail altogether. One of the...
View ArticleAnother $1 billion troubled system project
A few years ago, I posted about the Air Force’s abandoned $1 billion effort to consolidate all its many accounting systems. Now it appears the State of California is going through similar difficulties:...
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Telsa alleges theft of intellectual property
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty From the article by Jordan Golson over at Verge: The complaint, filed in California Superior Court, County of Santa Clara, alleges that Anderson...
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Post-mortem of large IT failure in Scotland
I am currently teaching CS 428 (“Software Engineering”) at BYU this semester, and my students just finished their midterm a week ago. Most of the questions on the test posed a hypothetical situation...
View ArticleMore Self-Driving Car Trade Secret Fallout — Waymo v. Uber
An earlier post here deal with allegations by Telsa that a former employee had stolen trade-secret information and taken it to a new startup. This latest article has a remarkably similar story, but...
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Minnesota DMV software project: Faulty Towers/Neverending Story patterns
In my 2000 white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: System Failure (1976-2000)” [PDF], which I researched and wrote while at PricewaterhouseCoopers, I describe six broad fact patterns to classify the...
View ArticleNeverending Story pattern: School District ERP system late, over-budget
A story a few days ago caught my eye, not because it was unusual, but because it follows so familiar a pattern. Here are a few excerpts from the article: MANATEE — Late nights, hefty contracts and...
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