Systems Development: Assessing Risk Factors
System project failures are a well-known part of systems development; however, all the potential risks of planning and executing a project effort are not. This white paper offers heuristic guidelines to help IS managers assess these inherent risk factors before initiating and while executing a project. Case examples illustrate how a particular risk factor can...Continue reading→
The Problem with Default Values
Are there hidden problems with default values in software? Virtually all information systems have “default values.” We put them in our systems to make things easier for the end-users as well as the system itself. As we will investigate in this white paper, there are many hidden problems with default values, some of which first...Continue reading→
Three Value Logic: The Case for an ‘Unknown’ Value in Software Logic
Relational databases, relational theory, relational calculus, and predicate logic all rely on a two-value truth. That is, that a given proposition or predicate is either true or false. The fact that the results of the query can be proven to be correct rests on the fact that it can be established that each part of...Continue reading→
The Magic Number in Complex Systems
Somewhere around 200 items seems to be the optimum number of interrelated things we can deal with at one time, when dealing with complex systems such as computer software. In 1956 George Miller wrote an article for the Psychological Review called “The magic number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity to...Continue reading→
System Project Failure: The Heuristics of Risk
An Evaluation of Risk Factors in Large Systems Engineering Projects This article was originally published in the Journal of Information Systems Management, Volume 8, Number 1, Winter 1991. It is reprinted here by permission of the publisher: www.crcpress.com System project failures are a well-known part of systems development; however. all the potential risks of planning and...Continue reading→
Deplorable Software
Why can’t we deploy software as well we did fifty years ago? The way we build and deploy software is deplorable. The success rate of large software projects is well under 50%. Even when successful, the capital cost is hideous. In his famous “Mythical Man Month,” Frederick Brooks observed that complexity comes in two flavors:...Continue reading→
A Minimalist Upper Ontology
Gist is designed to have the maximum coverage of typical business ontology concepts with the fewest number of primitives and the least amount of ambiguity, known as a minimalist upper ontology. A title guaranteed to scare off just about everyone; if you’re not familiar with work on upper ontologies, the title is just opaque. If...Continue reading→
Necessary and Sufficient
What’s the real difference between necessary and sufficient? We just completed another training class, and like they say, “no one learns more than the instructor.” In this case the blindingly obvious and yet elusive pattern that revealed itself was the separation of the sufficient from the necessary. Until last week, while we had an intellectual...Continue reading→
It Isn’t Architecture Until It’s Built
It’s our responsibility as architects to make sure our work is implemented. We’ve been dealing a lot lately with questions about what makes a good architecture, what should be in an architecture, what’s the difference between a technical architecture and an information architecture, etc. But somewhere along the line we failed to emphasize perhaps one...Continue reading→
Event-Driven Architecture
Event-driven architecture as the latest buzzword in the enterprise architecture space. If you’ve been reading the trade press lately, you no doubt have come across the term event-driven architecture as the latest buzzword in the enterprise architecture space. So you dig about to find out just what is this event-driven architecture. And if you dig...Continue reading→
