Torben Moller, Ph.D., Business Person, Technologist, Academic

My work is almost always project oriented, whether in business or academia. Thus I have great opportunities to see project succeed or fail and it is amazing how often automation projects continue to fail. If the civil engineering profession had the same track record nobody would ever venture above the ground floor! This ongoing issue is of great interest to me, not the least because I have been taught - and have myself taught - the basics for project success.

The miserable success rate of automation projects is all the more amazing because we are all taught the basics for success: get user involvement, create an appropriate list of requirements and ensure continued executive support - remember? Why is our track record so bad? Ironically, one common reason is because we humans are so adaptable in terms of making something work. We are, when motivated, able to integrate many different, half-baked, rules to make things work. Thus once we have to be very specific in defining requirements it is likely that some of the "when Thursday" rules are forgotten, resulting in Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Poor process definition has an additional effect: what you don't know, you can't measure, i.e. the ability to do process improvement - Lean, Kaizen, etc. - is limited when you do not understand what you are doing, and you also cannot value the improvements. The issues of Process, Value, and Change are of great interest to me, how do you well-define enough of the processes in an enterprise to be able to manage effectively without leading to the paralysis that ensues when one tries to well-define all processes to the n-th degree. I have found frameworks like ITIL and COBIT very useful in defining processes on the appropriate levels.

The classical issues will be with us forever, the issue/opportunities based on current technology and the current society change with society and technology. Currently, my interest are mobile and collaborative solutions relating to technology and how to make Web 2.0 truly useful outside of the current social sites.
I have seen great benefits of using collaborative tools such as Microsoft Sharepoint as well as general workflow tools in mobile solutions. Again, understanding your process is key!