George Jucan is an experienced Project Manager Professional (PMP) with 20 years of technical and management experience in complex environments, both in public and private sector. He is well known in the project management community as a successful IT project management consultant, speaker at public events, trainer and author of project management articles.
A survey published by CIO Insight on November 17, 2006 regarding Top Trends 2007 indicates that a significant majority of organizations treat business process improvement as their top priority. This is certainly not surprising, in an age of ever increasing cost and time-to-market pressures. And, in most cases, improving the business processes has a significant impact on IT delivery capabilities supporting these processes.
Many organizations engaged in business processes improvement are now questioning the traditional way of delivering the necessary IT solutions. In-house development becomes less and less attractive from cost and timeline perspectives, and alternate options like in-sourcing or outsourcing development--as well as outsourcing processing to application service providers--are an increasing trend.
Choosing the right solution to fulfill the business needs is quite often a daunting task, especially for organizations that are exploring alternate delivery methods for the first time. There is no guarantee that one method will deliver better results to a specific need, or that a delivery method that worked before (or for another company) would be suited for the current specifics of a particular organization.
To mitigate the risks, it is recommended to perform an (as much as possible) objective assessment of multiple options that are potentially
"More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."