John Parkinson

Halloween is the time for goblins, ghouls and ghost stories. But if you’re a CIO, chances are you’ve heard one or two IT terror tales. John Parkinson, former chief technologist at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young, has guided hundreds of companies through veritable nightmares. Here are his 8 favorite failures. Company names have been withheld. […]

One of the endless challenges for a large corporate software engineering organization is to develop an effective process for handling the steady stream of small changes, fixes and enhancements that seem to accumulate around installed software, both custom developed and Commercial of the Shelf (COTS)—no matter how good it is initially. Typically, these changes can […]

A strange thing has been happening to business telephony over the past decade: All the people you need or want to speak to have turned into voicemail. Sometimes when they get your message and call you back, you’ve turned into voice mail as well. This wastes a huge amount of time—and is, I believe, one […]

Last week I wrote about the evolving challenges of CIO education—and the need to figure out what a career path towards the CIO role might look like. This week I want to touch on the kinds of “survival strategies” that, at a high level, I think all technology executives must embrace and cultivate. I’ve been […]

Once a month or so, a small group of my friends and colleagues from the past 20 years get together for a one-hour conference call to discuss topics of mutual interest. Although we all met as management and technology consultants, we have diverse backgrounds and equally diverse current jobs. Our calls are wide-ranging and generally […]

My last two postings were about the difficulties of estimating the cost in time and money of software development projects, and the perils of planning them. This time I want to look at what happens when one or both of these processes fails, and you end up with a train wreck, yet you still have […]

In my last column, I wrote about the challenges we face when trying to create a useful estimate of the effort required to complete a software development project and the methods available to do so. As challenging as this is, it’s just the start of our journey to a predictable project outcome. Now we have […]

One of the hardest things to do in any human endeavor is to predict the future accurately. Since the future hasn’t happened yet, it is, by definition, to some degree uncertain. We may harbor highly developed expectations about what’s going to happen, but in most circumstances, we cannot be entirely sure. Yet for many “economic” […]

For most of the past few weeks I have been moderating an intense and evolving debate on software quality for one of my clients. The software engineering organization is struggling to balance speed of development (which is in many ways their proxy for market responsiveness), quality of deliverables, and lifecycle cost (their deliverables are potentially […]

For most of the last four years, I’ve been waiting for “mobility” to really change the way I work. In many small ways it already has. I can almost always get a broadband Internet connection when I’m traveling – either Wi-Fi in an increasing number of public and semi-public places or wired in hotels and […]

It’s almost exactly three years since I first saw (under strict non-disclosure) a demonstration of the new Microsoft client operating system that would one day become Vista. I was enthusiastic back then, and I’m just as enthusiastic now – and not just because I’m tired of the fragility of an aging Windows XP. Throughout the […]

“Every idea has its time—and when the time comes, just about everyone has the idea.” I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation over the past few weeks. Interest in the topic has seemed to come and go ever since Clay Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma hit the bookstands in 1997. And a recent study by IBM’s […]