Peter Coffee

Whether were talking about Japanese schoolgirls—quickly becoming the worlds leading indicator for technology adoption—or peripatetic U.S. knowledge workers, live connections and hands-off updates are becoming the sine qua non. This may mean the death of the PDA as the minimalist device that Palm was so often congratulated on bringing to market. The question is whether […]

The past two decades have drastically changed the popular perception of what it means to be an IT professional. Once seen as the defining example of predictability and control, the digital world now appears to many as a chaotic mix of opportunities and threats. No longer just the invisible stokers of the back-office engines of […]

Id never before used the word “autonomic” in an after-dinner speech, but it finally made the leap from lab to lectern May 26 at the presentation of the fourth annual eWEEK Excellence Awards in New York. IBMs ambitious vision of self-diagnosing, self-healing systems, I told our award-winning dinner guests and my fellow Excellence judges, is […]

Walking through the Los Angeles airport late last Wednesday night, I wasnt able to read the flight status display for my departure to New York. The critical part of the screen was occupied by a familiar System Process alert that said, “Your system is running low on virtual memory. Please close some applications …” When […]

During the 1992 presidential campaign, the headquarters of then-candidate Bill Clinton sported signs that said, “Its the economy, stupid.” In the same way, I wonder if IT strategy rooms ought to put up banners that read, “Its the data, stupid.” In the last few weeks, Ive encountered many reminders that databases are still an area […]

Few things get my fingers moving faster than having a flight to catch, and as I write this Im almost on my way to LAX. Ill be on the Sunday-night red-eye to JFK for this weeks CeBIT America trade show, the concurrent DCI CRM Conference, and the formal presentation of eWEEKs Fourth Annual Excellence Awards. […]

The story is familiar—even though its details are new. A person entrusted with power and responsibility comes under suspicion of misconduct, and sensitive information controlled by that person suddenly goes missing. These events could have taken place at any time since the invention of writing. As befits the current century, however, the affair at hand […]

Norman Augustine, a board member and former chairman of Lockheed Martin, is widely known for the wit and wisdom published as “Augustines Laws.” One of his best-known maxims is that productivity, regardless of the field of effort, is concentrated in a remarkably consistent way. Even in such diverse measures as the arrests made by police […]

From our Department of Being Careful What You Wish For, we suggest that the last thing any software team really wants is broad public attention to its first “almost good enough” effort. “When you release 1.0, you might want to actually keep it kind of quiet,” admonishes Joel Spolsky of New York-based Fog Creek Software […]

I wish that IT systems offered consistent truth in labeling. I want systems to disclose what they do and how they do it, and the means by which I can tell them not to do those things that I dont like. Its hard to achieve that level of disclosure and control today, because we need […]