Hi

Good article. This is perhaps off track but....

In the world of chaos in which IT companies are well and truely in, it is critical that developers and associated management work to a strategic framework that allows them to provide differentiated value-add to the the market place (along with some higene capabilities to keep generally employeed); but at the same time embrace true business needs and wants (both latent and blatent) in which to apply these core capabilities.

Unfortunatly, developers fall in the trap of "thats cool, lets do it" (with continual change) and upper management are either sold by marketers or have a tunnel like syndrome of technology and business needs that fail to see over the horizon let along whats in their face.

Not with-standing the core enconomics (there are 5 enconomic factors btw) underpinning a solutions "yes" or "no"; many people fail to really understand some basic principals in strategic planning which, with its strategic imperitives, should be the key factors that drives all application development work and every other portion of the business, no matter what the company.

Business should embrace future thinking as a basic principal. This may be:

+ understanding that we live and breath in a value-network (VN)

++ that lives in a past/present, immediate and future environment

+++ in which we analyse and "brail" the future, looking for strange attractors

++++ that our business's core is a series of 1st principals, encapsulated by core

capabilities which we trade value in the VN

unless we are focused on a mapped (and revisited) future, which is driven by stragetic imperitives and their associated projects to remold our core capabilities, most projects will drag on, with perhaps some good wins here and there, but missing the boat all too many times...

People need to get a framework in place (at any level), that is driven through stategic leadership at all levels, and only then will developers and upper management really see the light of not only their own business, but the real business of the people they work for, taking your core capabilities naturally with it.

Cheers

Ck

P.S. I can write a paper on future based thinking if anyone is interested...