Jim Highsmith
Member for
23 years 11 monthsJim Highsmith is the senior vice president and director of the Agile Software Development & Project Management Practice and a fellow of the Business Technology Council at Cutter Consortium LLC, Arlington, Mass. Jim Highsmith has written several books on Agile project management and development: Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (2004), Agile Software Development Ecosystems (2002), and Adaptive Software Development (2000) that won a Jolt Award.
Jim Highsmith is the senior vice president and director of the Agile Software Development & Project Management Practice and a fellow of the Business Technology Council at Cutter Consortium LLC, Arlington, Mass. Jim Highsmith has written several books on Agile project management and development: Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (2004), Agile Software Development Ecosystems (2002), and Adaptive Software Development (2000) that won a Jolt Award.
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| Paving Cow Paths In the IT world, "paving cow paths" means automating a business process as is, without thinking too much about whether or not that process is effective or efficient. Often business process automation initiatives require figuring out entirely new ways of doing business processes–impossible prior to automation (for example, work flow automation and digital image processing)–defining more effective and efficient process highways. In this week's column, Jim Highsmith warns that when we pave the cow paths and ignore the highways, we do a disservice to our customers. |