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Commentary: “Team Releases Tools for Secure Cloud Computing”

I noticed an August 2, 2010 article from the University of Texas at Dallas that should be of interesting to anyone focusing on cloud computing: it describes a collection of recently-released tools to help application developers build more robust and secure cloud applications. The article is titled “Team Releases Tools for Secure Cloud Computing.”
The tools [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 6 – Types of project-management sins: venal and cardinal

The longer I work in the IT industry, the more amazed I am at the type of mistakes that project managers make, and also the way they react to them — both at the time the mistake is committed, and when they talk about it weeks, months, or even years later.
I have a somewhat [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 5 – Advice to give *after* a sin has been committed

When a project manager “sinner” sits down to talk with his or her IT “confessor-priest,” one of two situations usually exists: either the sin has already been committed — i.e., the project manager has already made a mistake — or it has not. We’ll discuss these two situations in separate blog postings.
Assuming that the conversation [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 4 – ethical responsibilities of the confessor priest

Imagine that I’m the “confessor priest” in an IT project confessional environment, and a troubled project manager walks into my office, and tells me that in a fit of rage, he has just shot an obnoxious, uncooperative, unproductive members of his project team — point blank, right between the eyes. What should I do?
Or consider [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 3 – where do you find the sinners?

What would a priest do if he sat alone in his confessional box all day long, and nobody showed up to confess his sins? Perhaps he would just shrug, and come back again the next day. But eventually, he would … well, I’ll let someone who knows more about the protocol and procedures of organized [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 2 – History and the basics

Yesterday, I introduced the concept of a “project confessional,” where troubled IT project managers could confess their “sins” and ask for help.
Before we delve into the more subtle issues associated with such a confessional, I want to cover the basics … and before I do that, I want to acknowledge that this is not some [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 1

Imagine that you’re an IT project manager, and that you’ve just discovered you’ve made a terrible decision. It wasn’t deliberate, and perhaps it wasn’t even conscious; maybe it was a momentary outburst at an uncooperative programmer, caused by all the pressure and exhaustion from overtime. But now your uncooperative programmer has quit in a huff, [...]

Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston

I spent most of last week in Boston, attending the annual Enterprise 2.0 conference. This is the second or third E2.0 conference I’ve attended here (they begin to blur after a while), and it was generally a productive experience. But for the sake of posterity, here are a few other details:

The blatant sales pitch in [...]

Whither IT, part 15 – So how do we find the future?

Aside from putting our faith in the continuation of Moore’s Law for another decade or two, how do we anticipate the future of IT?
Let’s start by acknowledging that is not just one future lying ahead of us. There are many “potential” futures, some of which will come to fruition, and some of which will be [...]

Whither IT, part 14 – Generational trends

The great anthropologist Margaret Mead popularized the terms postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative — and it’s something we need to be aware of if we want to anticipate the impact of future IT technology. (See Mead’s Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap for more details.)
A postfigurative culture is one in which things don’t really [...]

Whither IT, part 13 – Social/cultural trends

To anticipate the social impact of future IT, it would help to be an expert sociologist with a perfect crystal ball. I don’t have such expertise, so I’ll restrict my comments to specific areas where I think I have some vague idea of what I’m talking about … and aside from that, I’ll simply recommend [...]