Innovation is part of the curriculum in just about any Agile engagement I carry out for Cutter. To my way of thinking, the linkage between Agile and innovation is straightforward. Agile enables affordable experimentation. Experimentation begets discovery. Discovery is the first step toward innovation.

Just about everyone of my clients responds heartily to this simple-minded derivation, and for a very good reason. Clients crave innovation as it gives them competitive advantage through the life cycle of the product. Hence, enhancing innovation is a very appealing message. I still have to meet a client who would say “well, you know, our problem is too much innovation…”

Short-term engagement do not usually give me the opportunity to watch the progress a company makes, or fails to make, with innovation. In long-term engagements I am noticing more and more that the {Agile Read more …

In September 2010 and in January, I attended two instances of “Stanford Leading Matters,” a roving conference by Stanford University aimed at raising the visibility (and gathering donations) for the “Stanford Challenge,” a decade-long $10 billion fundraiser.

This was a rather stellar production, complete with making the meeting hall look like a scale model of the university’s inner quad — sandstone arches and all. At every stop, Stanford University President John Hennessy spoke of the university’s vision, which is no less than helping solve the world’s toughest challenges; incredibly gifted and involved students provided their views in a panel moderated by Hennessy; professors gave lectures on important issues in today’s world; and very good food could be sampled.

I am a rather fastidious note taker, and I thought I’d share my notes from a presentation I attended at the Boston Read more …

It has been painful to watch the perennial angst of the CIO community. Each year, each conference, and each industry rag frets about what ails the CIO and what kind of CIO the CIO will need to be in the future. When viewed as a whole, the CIO community is paranoid and schizophrenic. Not only do we hear multiple conflicting voices in our collective heads, we have a sense that the future we created is out to get us.

Here at Cutter Consortium, we tackled this issue of the future of the CIO with some thought provoking and wildly different perspectives, ranging from the CIO is dead meat to a new kind of CIO is emerging (see: The Great Recession Fallout: Will CIOs Be Elevated or Exterminated? Cutter IT Journal, January, 2010. Editor’s note: Non-subscribers can download the Read more …

Every agilist brings his or her history to the community—agile didn’t spring from the primordial soup in 2001. While we may argue against historical practices, waterfall for example, we owe something to earlier pioneers. So while I can’t speak for other agilists, I can give a snapshot of who influenced my thinking over the years..

First, I would argue that agilists were influenced more by practical than academic literature (see Craig Larman’s Agile & Iterative Development for some historical perspectives). Writers who influenced me go back to the early work of Tom DeMarco, Jerry Weinberg, Ken Orr, Jean Dominique Warnier, Larry Constantine, Steve McMenamin, Ed Yourdon, and others during the early “methodology” period from about 1975 until the early 80′s. This was the early “structured development” era. Structured methods were then formalized into heavyweight methodologies, books and books of process Read more …

“I don’t hire older CIOs. I like them young.”

So barked an experienced and grizzled CEO in a conversation we had a decade ago. Why? Because they don’t know any better, he said. They overestimate their abilities, underestimate the problem, but work hard enough and are smart enough to pull it off.

I hope I don’t work for him, I distinctly remember thinking.

While overconfidence continues to be a consistent problem in IT, so does too much experience. Those experienced IT folks who may sandbag their estimates (partially out of painful memories from prior battles, partially out of CYA self-protection) constantly run into technology neophytes and amateurs who are deeply convinced that they can move better and faster than old fogeys so long as they have the latest IT toys. These days the experienced naysayers are more often than not Read more …

Last week I attended the monthly meeting of a local chapter of SIM (Society of Information Management), a professional society that I have belonged to for years. The after-dinner topic was “The 2010 Annual Report on Technology, Innovation and the Economy.” The last of the three panelists presented statistics and survey data showing that small businesses, particularly in the technology sector, were responsible for most, if not all, of the jobs created during previous recovery periods through innovation and, therefore, should be the recipient of all federal stimulus money targeted at job creation.

During the meeting I asked the speaker to explain his assertion that it was innovation by small businesses that led to their job creation ability. I offered that nothing in the numbers and analysis presented had demonstrated a linkage between the two. As is usually the case Read more …

The crystal ball gazing continues. Here are more excerpts from Cutter Senior Consultants’ predictions for 2010 and beyond.

Dave Rooney: Agile Software Development will follow the same pattern as two other game-changing trends — Relational Database Management Systems and Object-Oriented Programming over the upcoming decade. Claude Baudoin: Expect contractors and consultants to be in demand, and many of them will be ex-employees who, having found their past employer’s loyalty in short supply, will now be more interested in being their own boss than in rejoining as an employee. Ken Collier: Although Agile adoptions will proliferate, we will see an increase Agile project failures due to misunderstanding, misapplication, and misguided attempts to follow an “agile recipe”. Mike Rosen: Continued “cyber events” will temper the rush to the Cloud. Jeff Kaplan: The consumerization of IT by end-users and availability of a Read more …

Agile Project Management, 2nd Edition, July 2009. by Jim Highsmith. Listen to a podcast interview with Israel Gat and Michael Cote later this week at http://theagileexecutive.com/. The new edition:

Focuses on fundamentals of Agile project management, plus a new emphasis on issues impacting enterprise agility. Includes a new chapter Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: Measuring Agile Performance. The Agile Triangle: Value, Quality, Constraints; what quality is and why it is important; outcome performance metrics; output performance metrics; shortening-the-tail. Revises agile values and concepts chapters to reflect three agile management values: Delivering Value over meeting Constraints (Value over Constraints), Leading the Team over managing Tasks (Team over Tasks), Adapting to change over Conforming to plans (Adapting over Conforming). Includes a four-level agile framework: Project Governance, Project Management, Iteration Management, Technical Practices. Includes a new chapter on Advanced Release Planning: Value Read more …

Wolfram|Alpha is described as having four key components:

An ever-growing repository of underlying curated data piped in and stored on Wolfram Research systems, complementing the existing computable data stores already available through Mathematica. 5-6M lines of computational code repurposed from the Mathematica software kernel Rudimentary natural language processing (NLP) capability, which is optimized for this specific domain, and mapped into the underlying computational pattern language Automated presentation of results in the most useful way, using text, graphics, and sound, for the context of the submitted inquiry.

Relating Wolfram|Alpha to the Semantic Web As a researcher interested in all things related to the Semantic Web, I wanted to find out more about if, or how, Wolfram|Alpha might be leveraging W3C-based standards, including RDF linked data across OWL-based ontologies, to infer meaning and results across both curated and uncurated data stores.

Read more …

Earlier this month, via web conference, I had the privilege of participating in a live demo of the pre-release Wolfram|Alpha, presented in person by Mr. Wolfram, and had the opportunity to ask questions during the call. Subsequently, I received an invitation-only access to use the Wolfram|Alpha test application. The following is based on my notes during the presentation, as well as my own experiences test-driving Wolfram|Alpha.

As he started the call, Mr. Wolfram boldly exposed his ambition and the vision driving the Wolfram|Alpha project. To paraphrase (I took detailed notes!), he stated that this work will provide us the capability to take all the knowledge that exists in the world, and allow us to compute it. He also suggested that, like NKS and Mathematica, Wolfam|Alpha is a long term project. Mr. Wolfram noted that the project actually Read more …