John Parkinson

The value of RFID goes way beyond the supply chain. Imagine knowing exactly how old that carton of milk really is. Or how safe your tires are. Did you know that the first item ever commercially scanned by bar code was a ten-pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum? And that the first scan occurred in an […]

I spend a lot of my working time talking to senior business and technology executives at client companies about complex strategic issues involving the use of technology in business. It’s a big part of what I’m here to do and I enjoy it immensely, but over time it tends to distance you from the more […]

Back in the late seventies and early eighties, when I managed large, complex software projects for a living, I kept track of which programmers were contributing the most to the code we delivered to our customers. A typical development team consisted of eight to ten programmers writing and testing code for three months or so. […]

There’s been a lot written over the past couple of years on the concept of the “real-time enterprise.” Let me start by admitting that, as a mathematician by training, the term “real time” carries a lot of baggage for me. Nevertheless, there are a lot of software engineering ideas in areas such as embedded systems […]

In the midst of the continuing revelations about suspect accounting practices, inflated earnings and pro forma obfuscation, my colleagues at CGE&Y recently published the results of a May 2002 survey of 265 CFOs from mostly large companies—eight out of 10 had more than $1 billion in revenues—on their thoughts about the current and future state […]

Back in the early 1990s, long before all the excitement surrounding the Internet, I spent a weekend with an old technology buddy in Ann Arbor, Mich. The plan was to help him install a new personal computer, but the real “ah-ha!” of the weekend came from observing his seven-year-old son play Super Mario Brothers and […]

When I first started in full-time consulting, back in 1985, I encountered the relatively new work of the three Johns: Rockart, Henderson and Sifonis. Their combined research at the Center for Information Systems Research at MIT’s Sloan School of Management set the agenda for much of the thinking about aligning business strategy and technology over […]

Click on a response above for further analysis of each scenario. The four short-term political and economic scenarios—12 to 18 months out—presented here suggest a variety of potential consequences for business and IT. For further analysis of each of these scenarios, including answers to the following questions, click on the response above. What are the […]

Amongst the next big challenges in business computing is what we call “users as programmers.” It’s the elimination of almost all application programming as we think about it today. You switch out of the idea of hard-coded applications and into the mindset that you give users a portfolio of somewhat self-assembling tools they can put […]