John Parkinson

Late in 2005, the CIO of a fortune 20 company whom I have known for many years asked me to take a look at benchmarking his IT organization against its peers. On the surface, this was a reasonable request. The CIO wanted to know how well he was doing against some key performance indicators and […]

A couple of decades ago I was involved in a project to review some extremely sophisticated decision support technology—the onboard avionics suite of a new high-performance military airplane. The technology had been in development for over a decade, so it was already well behind the state of the art from a hardware perspective, but the […]

In my last column, I wrote at some length about the potential for a significant productivity gain from the new user interface and interaction experience technologies that will begin to appear later this year and next, specifically Microsoft’s Vista. In this piece, I want to explore the downside—all the effort and cost that we will […]

Usability has always been a big—and sometimes badly handled—issue in information systems design. Ever since Apple launched the current generation of GUI design metaphors (borrowing heavily from Xerox PARC, of course) and Microsoft followed with the Windows series of evolutions, we have lived with usability within a defined context. Because these (distinct but internally consistent) […]

I just finished a fascinating piece of work for a client who wanted to launch an IT Asset Management program to get a better handle on what hardware and software technology the business owned; where it was; and what it was being used for. This is not a huge company, but it operates in quite […]

Last week I spent a lot of time thinking about the changing role of service providers as the technologies that power the platforms they provide increasingly impact their business models. Out of this came some speculation on who will be able to change most effectively to take advantage of the volatility and turmoil in the […]

For much of the past week, I have been debating software quality and how to measure it with one of my clients. Twenty years ago, when I managed software development for a living, I had three quality “metrics” for my engineering teams: delivered defect density; usability; maintainability. Each was based on several different measures—for example […]

Last week in this space I looked at the loss of productivity that occurs when the members of a software engineering team aren’t fully co-located and immediately accessible to each other all the time. If all the dispersed resources cost the same as local resources, it simply wouldn’t be worth the dispersion (except for situations […]

It’s conventional wisdom that the best productivity in software engineering comes from teams that work in the same location and in close proximity to each other. Indeed, the “Agile” community makes almost a fetish out of this. Much of my past experience supports the proposition—I once gained an almost 100 percent productivity improvement amongst several […]

Just 26 publicly traded U.S. Companies posted revenues of more than $50 billion in 2004 (allowing for various fiscal year-ends) to get into the $50 billion club. Between them they account for a lot of people (several million employees globally), a lot of business ($2.5 trillion in collective revenues, and only one of them failed […]

Ever since the process reengineering wave of the 1990s, businesses have been looking at their core operations with an eye to cutting costs. Companies typically have three options: Consolidate and standardize operating processes via a shared-services strategy; upgrade the level of automation to reduce labor costs and boost productivity; or outsource the process to a […]

“The Information Revolution is over—information won.” —Thomas Pearson, Quality Progress One of my favorite technology trend lines derives from work originally done by researchers at IBM in the 1980s. They looked at the fundamental data storage efficiency equation—how many physical atoms does it take to reliably store a single data bit? Back in the early […]