I was describing the value that DCG provides to its clients to a new acquaintance over the weekend.  He does not work in IT.  Naturally, he asked the question that we are all asking each other these days, “How will your business be affected by the recession?”  I responded with my usual statement that our business is pretty recession proof, in fact we are very busy right now, because our clients prioritize different things at different times in the cycle.  When times are good, our clients are interest in process improvement and measurement because they need to find ways to deliver more projects with a shorter time to market to keep pace with expanding business.  Productivity and quality? Yeah, sure - as soon as we get these projects out.  Now, the focus is on productivity and meeting the businesses expectations at the lowest possible cost or, at least, a comparable cost to our peers.  Quality is important now because of it’s impact on productivity.

My new acquaintance thought about this for a moment and said, “You would think that the most successful companies would have IT organizations that turned out the most projects at the lowest unit cost and the best quality.  That’s how most industries work.”

Anyone got any examples of IT organizations that do this consistently?  Does your company?

I recently read the first paper (with the above title) by Craig Symons and Alex Cullen with Tim DeGennaro in the Forrester series of articles entitled, “CIO Success Imperatives.”  This paper shares many messages with our book (Business Value of IT) which they sum up as the “common framework of “people, processes and tools.”

But what do they mean by “Culture?”  Interestingly, they assert that:

The Right People + The Right Measures = The Right Culture

At first glance, this seems too simplistic but the authors are really highlighting the interdependency between how people are measured (and, by implication, how people are rewarded) and how they behave.  They go to to argue that its how people behave that defines the culture.  All good stuff and the most succinct expression of this fundamental truth that i have seen.  Of course, easy to say, much more difficult to achieve.

If you want to download (and pay for) the Forrester report, you can access it at the following link:

G2A-WP-Forrester-Culture-N?ID=7010000000057Yv

The November/December Issue of IEEE Software celebrated the 25th anniversary of the publication.

software

As an IEEE Member of long standing and a long-time reader of IEEE Software, it is interesting to reflect that my reaction to most issues is based on how many things are changing and how many things are staying the same.   The commemorative issue reinforces this feeling.

In this issue, Shari Lawrence Pfleeger writes an interesting but brief article on, “Software Metrics: Progress after 25 years?”  To her credit, she focuses on how we can improve the path forward by offering up four challenges:

1. We must learn how to deal with considerable uncertainty in software development
2. We must recognize software development’s multidisciplinary nature and the concomitant need for measuring “softer” aspects of relevant variables, such as developer experience or expertize.
3. We must find a way to understand and anticipate some of the inevitable change we see during software development and maintenance.
4. We should make room for heuristics, based on careful study of their effectiveness.

These are interesting because they represent areas where DCG is focusing more and more of our energy.

However, if these are our future challenges, have we really made any progress in the last 25 years?

I would argue “yes” but what do you think?

Since our book was published, I am seeing the phrase “Business Value of Technology/IT” more and more.  I guess it’s a sort of affirmation or maybe even a compliment. I saw the above title on a short article by Faisal Hoque in the November issue of Baseline magazine.  Faisal asserts that “using the right metrics to assess the business value derived from technology is critical in demonstrating the effectiveness of business technology investments.”  I agree completely.  So what are they?  Unfortunately, while Faisal gives us some excellent pointer for a process to find the metrics, there are no examples of what the metrics might be.  Check it out for yourself at the link below:

Assessing-the-Business-Value-of-Technology