The Rational Unified Process or The New CIO Leader

The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction

Author: Philippe Kruchten

Philippe Kruchten is the lead architect of the Rational Unified Process. Mr. Kruchten has more than twenty-seven years of experience in the development of large, software-intensive systems for telecommunications, defense, aerospace, transportation, and software development tools. He is also the author of The Rational Unified Process, An Introduction (Addison-Wesley), which has been translated into seven languages and has sold more than 150,000 copies in its two editions.

Booknews

Offers a quick introduction to the concepts, structure, content, and motivation of the Rational Unified Process, a Web-enabled software engineering process that enhances team productivity and delivers software best practices to all team members. This second edition is updated to match the contents of the latest version of the Rational Unified Process, with more guidance on e-development, applying the process, testing, and designing systems using patterns and frameworks. The author has 25 years of experience in the development of large, software-intensive systems. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Jack Woehr

Rational Is As Rational Does

The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction is a good overview of Rational's prescription for whole-project health. The process is unified as in "Unified Field Theory." Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, (or Booch, Jacobson, and Rumbaugh, as they are known today) twine in a celestial dance to the Spheres, Rectangles, Clouds, and stray pointers that make up UML and its increasingly ambitious extensions, additions, and heroic leaps of faith.

Rational visualizes the elements and modalities of code and projects in a fashion found compelling by increasing numbers of corporate customers. It's a vision embodied in several software suites, including the eponymous Rational Unified Process, for which this book is designed to serve as the introduction. Face it, you are going to run into Rational on the job. This volume is a good place to get know about it.

The book is not an independent assessment of Rational. Editor Philippe Kruchten is lead architect of the Rational Unified Process product. The thrust is the process of processes, specifically process in software projects, as viewed by Rational and supported by its project-management toolsets.

The tone is set for the book in Chapter One, which is Grady Booch's "Software Development Best Practices." Booch lists 19 "Symptoms and Root Causes of Software Development Problems." Booch clearly hasn't worked anywhere I've worked, because missing from his list are "Moron from acquired business unit appointed director," "Manager owns nice suit but can't follow logical proof," and "Inept team member keeps job by threatening suicide."

All of us have our own notations, albeit hastily scribbled, for the steps and players of a project or computational process. Believing, as nerds tend to do, that the methods used to describe program objects and execution steps are suitable for managing human social units, Rational's scientists, to their credit, have elevated napkin scratching and whiteboard scrawls to an art form, and given our industry a certain shared vocabulary of icons for these familiar entities. They've also made a few not entirely obvious comments about software testing that can't do any harm by their addition to the literature.

However, I found nothing new in this volume that was helpful, and nothing helpful that was new. I summarize here at random from The Rational Unified Process:

One should cope with risk by a policy of risk avoidance, risk transfer, risk acceptance, risk mitigation and contingency planning.

A metric is a measurable attribute of an entity.

If you must hit the market early, you can shorten the construction phase and lengthen the transition phase.

In other words, if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with ISO-9001. The first two of the above are self-referential and the third is a tautology. We don't need more planning gurus -- we need more software engineers with liberal arts educations and a minor in Formal Logic.

Here are more hastily excerpted gems, with my comments in parentheses:

The following are examples of iteration goals [in the Transition Phase]:

1. Fix all severity 1 problems discovered at beta customer sites.... This may be related to credibility in the market.

(Fix the major problems your beta sites report? What a concept! This could revolutionize software development.)

In building a base plan, you must assess trade-offs between staff, schedule and project scope.

(You mean, I have to carefully marshal my resources? Didn't Sun Tzu say this umpteen years ago? Doesn't anyone read classics anymore?)

The scary thing is that statements like these may come as news to some folks working for your company. Apparently, they are the intended audience, those people who know nada about software development yet are managing projects (and who also, one assumes, have purchase authority for project management software).

A good idea, well-positioned within the technology of the time and in accordance with the genuine needs of an informed user group, designed and executed by a team sharing a vision and managed by an inscrutable, diplomatic, restrained, and benevolent management team... In such a case development, delivery, installation, training, and maintenance are simplicity itself and demand no special tools at all.

It's the worst-designed programs that you spend the most time debugging, and it's the worst thought-out projects that are laden with fashionable project-management tools. In my worm's-eye view, you will always find management using these tools on the screwed-up projects.

Assuming I'm correct in my assessment, we can probably expect the Rational Unified Process to be mandated by law in the near future. With that in mind, The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction is a mercifully short introduction.--Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books

See also: The Differentiated Network Organizing Multinational Corporations for Value Creation or Financial Management

The New CIO Leader: Setting the Agenda and Delivering Results

Author: Marianne Broadbent

An Actionable Framework for Elevating the CIO's Strategic Role

Two converging factors-the ubiquitous presence of technology in organizations and the recent technology downturn-have brought Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to a critical breaking point. They can seize the moment to leverage their expertise into a larger and more strategic role than ever before, or they can allow themselves to be relegated to the sideline function of "chief technology mechanic."

Drawing from exclusive research conducted by Gartner, Inc., with thousands of companies and CIOs, Marianne Broadbent and Ellen Kitzis reveal exactly what CIOs must do now to solidify their credibility with the executive team and bridge the chasm that currently separates business and IT strategy. The New CIO Leader outlines the agenda CIOs need to integrate business and IT assets in a way that moves corporate strategy forward- whether a firm is floundering, successfully competing, or leading its industry.

Mandatory reading for CIOs in every firm, The New CIO Leader spells out how information systems can deliver results that matter-and how CIOs can become the enterprise leaders they should be.

Author Biography:

Marianne Broadbent is a Gartner Fellow at Gartner, Inc., Associate Dean at Melbourne Business School and coauthor of Leveraging the New Infrastructure (HBS Press, 1998). Ellen Kitzis is Group Vice President of Gartner's Executive Programs, a membership-only program for over 2000 CIOs.

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Setting The Agenda And Delivering Results
According to corporate advisers Marianne Broadbent and Ellen Kitzis, chief information officers (CIOs) today are at a crossroads in the business environment. In one direction lies a lingering dissatisfaction with information technology (IT) that is left over from the bust of the Internet bubble, the belief that IT is irrelevant to competitive advantage, and concern over IT jobs being outsourced to faraway countries. In the other direction lies the view of IT as a source of business innovation; a foundation for products and services; and a way for companies to comply with the timeliness, completeness and accuracy of corporate information that are required by the current regulatory environment. In The New CIO Leader, the authors describe how CIOs can most effectively follow this second path, win credibility and earn a higher role in their organizations.

According to the authors, the role of the new CIO leader requires changes to the traditional CIO skills, approach and priorities. Although these changes might not appear to be revolutionary, they point out that CIOs who do not make them will have difficulty in their executive experience.

To determine how CIOs can consistently deliver results that matter to the executive team, the authors have performed years of research and surveys that have taught them much about the changing demands on CIOs. In The New CIO Leader, they explain the results of their studies and describe how CIOs can face the challenge of becoming an irreplaceable part of a company's success and what new skills, priorities and actions they need to take to reach the next level.

Three Categories of Enterprises
The authors write that all enterprises tend to fall into one of three categories at any given time. They call the three categories of enterprises fighting for survival, maintaining competitiveness, and breaking away.

In the first category, companies struggle to find ways to cut costs while going through layoffs and scaling back capital investments and long-term projects, including IT development. Maintaining-competitiveness companies tend to mirror the economy: In tough times they are cautious about new business projects; in better times, new projects gradually increase. Breaking-away enterprises tend to aggressively increase their business investments — and IT budgets — each year, and seek IT-enabled business innovation to gain competitive advantage. The authors write, "Enterprises that are fighting for survival need CIO leadership every bit as much as enterprises that are breaking away."

Ten Critical Points of Focus
Throughout The New CIO Leader, the authors present 10 critical points of focus that differentiate the new, more effective CIO leaders from their struggling counterparts. They explain that the first and second points in their list provide the firm foundation that is required for the rest to be effective. These are:

1. New CIO leaders must lead, not just manage. Leadership and management are not the same; they are complementary. To lead, a CIO needs a personal vision and a point of view about how information and IT can make his or her enterprise more effective.
2. New CIO leaders must know their enterprise inside and out, as thoroughly as, if not better than, their executive colleagues do. A CIO needs to know his or her industry and competitive environment and be able to engage key decision makers and stakeholders on their terms.


Based on these points, the rest of the principles described in detail throughout The New CIO Leader develop the role of the CIO in any organization by laying down the clear actions a CIO must take while becoming more proactive. These critical points of focus are:


3. Create a vision for how IT will build your organization's success.
4. Shape and inform expectations for an IT-enabled enterprise.
5. Create clear and appropriate IT governance.
6. Weave business and IT strategy together.
7. Build a new information services (IS) organization — one that is leaner and more focused than its more traditional predecessor.
8. Develop and nurture a high-performing team in your IS organization.
9. Manage the new enterprise and IT risks.
10. Communicate IS performance in business-relevant language.

The authors write that, although these 10 points of focus are not the only issues with which a CIO must cope, they are the most critical issues facing CIOs today. New CIOs must be ready to build credibility by working on each of them.

Why We Like This Book
While providing the theoretical basis and practical application sides of the CIO equation, The New CIO Leader remains readable because it captures real-world IT stories and turns them into a path for CIOs to follow. By remaining down-to-earth in their presentation of facts and concepts, the authors offer winning guidance to all CIOs. Copyright © 2005 Soundview Executive Book Summaries