Cutter Fellow Tom DeMarco‘s IEEE Software Computing Now magazine editorial Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone? has caused quite a stir.

Tom’s article has spread like wildfire through the Twitterverse (beginning with @yourdon), and has inspired many surprised (and insightful) blog posts.  Johannes Ernst finds Tom’s statement that he’s “gradually coming to the conclusion that software engineering is an idea whose time has come and gone” as shocking as “the pope declaring that perhaps god doesn’t exist.” Coding Horror‘s Jeff Atwood went further, stating “If your head just exploded, don’t be alarmed. Read more …

With 2009 looming large, ugly and just around the corner, it’s time for the obligatory prognostications. Boy is this difficult… Hmmm. What will next year bring? Any wild guesses?

Rather than focus on the dark clouds, I am going to first look for the silver lining ahead.

Trend 1: Firms will try to remove redundant islands of business process and technology. Already system integrators and enterprise vendors are polishing their CFO pitches. In 2009, big vendors won’t be selling the CIO. They will be selling the person telling the CIO to cut budgets. 2009 may be the year that companies try to get a leg up on business process and enterprise system consolidation to further reduce the cost of IT and the cost of inefficient business processes. Maybe it will be déjà vu all over again as we may Read more …