Love this from Gartner. "Gartner Estimates Global 'IT Debt' to Be $500 Billion This Year, with Potential to Grow to $1 Trillion by 2015".

NetworkWorld ran a quicky version of the story. Gartner: Global 'IT debt' hits $500 billion, on the way to $1 trillion.

ComputerWorld -- to be proper journalists …

The question of "customization" and "extension" is a common one. For example, "non-technical users to be able to extend with simple scripts".

Read this question on Stack Overflow: "Programming / scripting language aimed at non-technical people".

This is -- at best -- little more than an attractive nuisance. At worst, of course, it …

Here's a great post called "Toward a Catalog of Scrum Smells". This lists some "Management Smells": specifically doing clumsy, ineffective things and calling it "Scrum".

I found this in StackOverflow question, titled "Any stories where trying to apply Scrum went wrong?"

Another great answer was a link to "Scrummerfall: World's …

In Creating Complexity Where None Existed, I noted that it's possible to create complexity out of thin air.

Indeed, by wallowing in the supposed drama, one can turn the differences between sales and service delivery into a hopelessly complex situation. A focus on a manufactured "conflict" leads to the following …

I read a 482-word treatise that amounted to these four words "sales and delivery disagree".

A more useful summary is "Sales and Delivery have different views of the order".

It started out calling the standard sales-delivery differences a "Conflict" requiring "Resolution". The description was so hopelessly enmeshed in the conflict …

Let's say you've found some new, good way to do business.

JSON, for example. Or Agile Methods in general. Or TDD specifically. Or use of an ORM.

You read up on it. You build a spike solution to show that it's more efficient.

They say "You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure". This isn't quite right, however. You can measure lots of things you can't manage. Rainfall, for example. Software development is like that. You can measure stuff that you can't actually control.

The original Deming quotes are more subtle: there are things …

Software developers get so used to their Culture of Complexity, they hardly notice it.

See Asshole-Driven Development for more thoughts on this. The comments add lots and lots of examples of dysfunctional development. Many of these are additional examples of complexity run amok.

My personal addition is Next Year's Dollars …

I sat through a great use case analysis session recently.

"Great" because I saw lots of ways to derail a simple process. Eventually, we did identify a couple of actors and a couple of use cases. But it took hours and hours.

Bonus: this was the third go-round on these …

We're not really talking about "Learning Styles" as much as "Denial Styles". This is a list of responses to "Astonishment" I've seen.

We're not talking about the Kübler-Ross model of grief, although this is similar.

However, the response to astonishment isn't a "progression" toward acceptance. Some folks simply don't like …