From Boxes and Arrows, March 2008. 

"There are many kinds of failure in large, complex organizations – breakdowns occur at every level of interaction, from interpersonal communication to enterprise finance. Some of these failures are everyday and even helpful, allowing us to safely and iteratively learn and improve communications and practices. Other failures – what I call large-scale – result from accumulated bad decisions, organizational defensiveness, and embedded organizational values that prevent people from confronting these issues in real time as they occur."

Peter Jones is managing principal of Redesign Research, a consulting practice for information product design, independent research and innovation strategy, located in Dayton and Toronto. As a consultant, Peter organizes and conducts field, cognitive, and usability research on information practices (or knowledge work that uses and transforms information artifacts).

We know that we must involve all the stakeholders if we want to discover a project’s requirements. But we need some guidelines on how to involve the right people and, given how busy everyone is, how to minimize the time and maximize the result. In this column, requirements guru Ellen Gottesdiener shares her considerable experience running requirements workshops.

Brian Oberkirch, Tantek Celik and Joseph Smarr speaking at FOWA Miami 2008 on The Future Social Web about making social networks work much better together.

More in this blog post too. 

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An article on closing the gap between Marketing and IT over the topic of User Experience.

Robert Hertzbert outlines 10 best practices for getting better IT-Business alignment in this article from Baseline Magazine last month.  The 10 best practices are summarized below and you can click on the "View Link Now" to see the whole article.

1. Emphasize the Governance Function
2. Establish an I.T. Steering Committee
3. Know How (And When) To Do a Business Case
4. Measure the Right Things
5. Create a Shared Pool of Bonus Money
6. Install a High-Level I.T. Liaison in Every Business Unit
7. Distribute a List of Ongoing Projects—To the Business as Well as I.T.
8. Network (in a Non-Technical Way)
9. Create Multi-Disciplinary Teams for High-Priority Projects
10.Think Beyond Mere "Alignment"