Quoting IT: Call for Reform in Federal IT Management

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on

"Information technology should enable government to better serve the American people. But despite spending more than $600 billion on information technology over the past decade, the Federal Government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT. Too often, Federal IT projects run over budget, behind schedule, or fail to deliver promised functionality. Many projects use “grand design” approaches that aim to deliver functionality every few years, rather than breaking projects into more manageable chunks and demanding new functionality every few quarters. In addition, the Federal Government too often relies on large, custom, proprietary systems when “light technologies” or shared services exist.

Government officials have been trying to adopt best practices for years – from the Raines Rules of the 1990s through the Clinger Cohen Act and the acquisition regulations that followed. But obstacles have always gotten in the way. This plan attempts to clear these obstacles, allowing agencies to leverage information technology to create a more efficient and effective government."

-Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer, 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management, December 9, 2010

Crossroads: Determining the future of CMSReport.com

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on

Slowly but surely, CMSReport.com has turned into a nice side business for me. The problem is that this site has grown to a point that it demands more of my time than I can currently offer it. The future of CMS Report is now sitting at crossroad. I plan to be spending the next few months deciding where this site should go from here.

Some of the options I am considering for this site include:

  • Partnering with others to build a bigger and better CMSReport.com. I wouldn't mind seeing this site become more of a community driven site.
  • Selling CMSReport.com, both domain and site, to a company or someone whom can take this site to the next level.
  • Returning CMSReport.com back to its roots as a personal blog.

Five years ago, I started CMS Report by wanting to build a website focused on reporting today's news in the world of content management systems (CMS). At the time, I was obsessed with information systems and realized that a CMS is one of the best vehicles to putting the ideals of information systems into practice. My goal was to either blog here at the site about content management or to refer others to CMS stories posted elsewhere. My strategy was to make this site my personal bookmark for stories that would interest me and perhaps a few others that might share my interest in this emerging market of Web content management.

Microsoft's Silverlight developers are angry

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on

A few days ago, I read Mary Jo Foley's article titled Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted. According to an interview with the President of the Server and Tools Division at Microsoft, the company will be shifting support for Silverlight away from the PC and Mac desktop and toward the phone market.

So what’s a developer to make of Microsoft’s messaging (or lack thereof) about Silverlight at its premiere developer conference?

I asked Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools business, that very question and got what I consider to be the clearest answer yet about how Microsoft is evolving its Silverlight strategy.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.

But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.

Microsoft plans to be using HTML 5 to replace the functions currently being provided by Silverlight 5.

It is not the point of this post to debate the merits of HTML 5, Silverlight and even Flash. What is my point though, is that Microsoft appears to me to be desperate. Desperate to come up with a strategic plan that will carry them beyond the day of Windows PCs. Microsoft is desperate to become innovative for the sake of innovation that they're really confusing a lot of their developers. If only after a few years of support, Microsoft is shifting focus of it's Silverlight platform...what potential developer in his or her right mind would support another future Microsoft endeavor? Just take a look at the comments to Bob Muglia's blog post discussing this topic and I think you'll see my point.

Strategic Content Management

webby's picture
Submitted by webby on

A List Apart: Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?

Managing IT to Win in the Recovery

CMS Report's picture
Submitted by CMS Report on

BusinessWeek: "When the U.S. economy tanked in 2008, companies were quick to rein in information technology spending. Now, amid signs of recovery, they risk problems by ramping up IT budgets too quickly to compensate. Market researcher Gartner (IT) forecasts that global IT spending will swing from a 4.6 percent decline in 2009 to a 4.6 percent increase this year, to $3.4 trillion.

When You Think the Strategy is Wrong

CMS Report's picture
Submitted by CMS Report on

Harvard Business Review: Chances are that at some point in your career you've been asked to implement a strategy that was developed by someone other than yourself. A manager's job is to implement that strategy, and to be sure that her team, unit, or department executes well. But what if you believe the strategy you've been asked to implement is flawed?

Complete Story

Quoting: Committees and Group Decisions

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on

"All too often, however, committees don't work well at all -- resulting in a relentlessly short-term outlook, an inability to stick to strategic plans, a slapdash pursuit of the latest fad and a tendency to blame mistakes on somebody else."

-Jason Zweig, "The Intelligent Investor: How Group Decisions End Up Wrong-Footed", The Wall Street Journal, April 25-26, 2009

 

Pages