“It was twenty years ago today…” (John Lennon and Paul McCartney)
Twenty years ago, I hit my first midlife crisis. It was centered on whether or not to leave behind some sixteen years of institutional consulting (at Arthur Andersen/Accenture and Laventhal and Horwath) and either buy a motorcycle, or start my own business.
I undertook the latter on February 1, 1988, and created WSR Consulting Group, LLC. www.wsrcg.com. Since those first months, when this was initially a IT consulting firm, we have branched out into IT turnaround work for “runaway projects”, and acting as expert witnesses in matters involving high tech, systems, and software failures.
We, as a firm, have garnered clients in Asia, Europe, Canada, the Caribbean and all over the United States. I have personally been designated an expert witness in Malaysia (involving the failure of the Malaysian Stock Exchange on opening day), as well as a large manufacturing plant that builds and assembles computers, laptops and servers in England.
I have testified with the Department of Justice as an expert witness in a matter filed against President Bill Clinton involving a failed robotics Army base. Note, you can sue the President, in the Court of Federal Claims, under certain circumstances. In this matter he was named as head of the US Armed Forces and the BRAC Commission (Base Realignment and Closing).
During the past 20 years, the world itself has changed as new countries were created and old ones lost to history. The world is flat – again! Advances in medicine and science have been mind boggling. The human genome code has been broken and promises to be useful in treating and perhaps eliminating certain diseases and disabilities.
The Internet changed everything – especially the World Wide Web -- and especially e-commerce.
9/11 changed everything too – for everyone, everywhere.
Currently, Americans are courting their first Afro-American and first female presidential candidates.
My hybrid Prius gets 46.1 miles to the gallon.
There is global warming – isn’t there?
Yet with all of these advances in science, technology, medicine, politics, and psychology, one technology area has not kept pace with other advancements – that is the area imagining, planning, building, implementing, and maintaining sophisticated and successful large-scale information systems. Despite all of the panaceas that have been promised over the last 20 or so years, according to the Chaos reports produced by the Standish Group, the success rate has not exceeded 35% -- good enough for a baseball average but certainly frustratingly unacceptable for the IT industry. Another third are deemed “challenged” projects with large time and schedule overruns, and under-featured and poor quality deliverables.
Such hopeful panaceas have included:
- CASE TOOLS
- CMM and CMMI
- Fourth generation programming languages
- Object oriented methodologies and standards
- Unified Modeling Languages (UML)
- Agile methodologies
- Static testing; and formal reviews, walk-throughs, inspections
- Better estimating models, parameters, and more and better historical statistics
- Formal static testing: reviews, walk-throughs, and inspections
- CIO moved from reporting to CFO to reporting to a higher level CXO
- Unified Modeling Language (UML)
- Outsourcing of IT functions abroad especially to India
- SaaS – Software as a Service
- The merger, acquisition, and consolidation of large software companies into mega-companies
- Project management standards as described by PMI, SWEBOK, DOD and Mil Spec standards, commercial SDLC methodologies such as Method/1, and more.
- Formal college degrees in software engineering; vendor certificate programs
- Enhanced databases & database languages that “do all the work for you”
- and many more
Accordingly, the purpose of this blog/forum is to bring together IT: professionals, executives, in-house counsel, attorneys and litigators (specializing in IT matters), CIO’s, and educators to post lessons learned and practical, implementable recommendations and strategies to benefit others. It is not intended to be about the long-term future of IT as much as it is intended to be about the IT now and what each company or organization or individual can do to make it work better for them.
We strive for a forum of attorneys and IT professionals to have ongoing, creative, substantive dialogue, allowing each to do a better job in their respective areas of expertise.
Our focus, which will change from time to time depending on what’s happening in IT, is in the following areas of large-scale software development and implementation:
- Long term strategic IT planning
- Aligning IT plans with business strategies
- Planning and managing large-scale implementation projects
Enterprise application integration
ERP Systems
- Work breakdown structure for large projects
- Project management standards and best practices
- Estimating your IT project
- Software engineering
- Software design
- Programming standards
- Testing strategy planning and implementation
- Implementing your system
- Maintaining your system
And with the help of our lawyer community, establish best practices for contracts:
- Software licenses
- Software development
- Maintenance agreements
- Outsourcing
- Consulting Services
- Testing strategy planning and implementation
- Implementing your system
- Maintaining your system
Finally, from time to time we will synthesize postings to come up with balanced scorecards, detailed report cards, checklists, and other tools that can be used by our community for immediate and important “take home and implement” value.
So please, visit http://blog.wsrcg.com, and share your thoughts and comments on something important to you, and join me in making this blog an ongoing resource to you, your colleagues, your clients and your firm.
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