InfoWorld’s cover story is "The
Top 20 IT Mistakes
," and
it’s a rogues’ gallery indeed.  Amusingly, many are the converse
of another:  For example, "botching your outsourcing strategy"
vs. "offshoring with blinders on." 

The moral I take away is that many of these are not "IT" mistakes—they’re
people mistakes.  Ones like "discounting internal security threats"
are obvious enough; depending on whether you believe Gartner, 70%
of security incidents involving an actual loss are inside jobs.  But
others, while less blatant, are still at bottom people issues:

  • "promoting the wrong people:"  Well, sure; don’t
    assume your top technologist deserves or wants a management position.
  • "mishandling change management:"  Change is a constant,
    but so is people’s resistance to same.  You must anticipate
    this and bake it in to your project planning.
  • "mismanaging software development:"  Which most
    frequently occurs when frustrated IT managers throw more and more
    of the "mythical man-month" at a tardy or delayed project.  The
    solution instead is to find better programmers; "almost nothing else
    matters, really."
  • "letting engineers do their own QA:"  Res ipsa loquitur.

I recommend you read it all—and this goes double for those of
you in the audience who are not in IT management.  This
is a devil you need to know.

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