(Inter)national Medal of Technology
Reading Software Development over lunch today I learned that Pres. Bush recently awarded software engineering guru Watts Humphrey one of this year’s National Medals of Technology. The President’s remarks included the statement, “Your work is making our country more competitive, more hopeful, and more prosperous. On behalf of a grateful nation, congratulations for earning the National Medals of Science and Technology.”
Humphrey’s signal achievement is perhaps his having laid the groundwork of the Capability Maturity Model for Software (SW-CMM), a framework for evaluating and promoting the effectiveness of software teams. Whether or not you agree with the SW-CMM approach and philosophy of software process improvement, it’s difficult to deny that the goal is worthy and that the SW-CMM hasn’t made a large number of software organizations less dysfunctional. [Update: Blistering barnacles! You can tell I’m low on sleep when I start writing in quintuple negatives! — N. J.]
The irony here is that the SW-CMM has probably done far more for foreign competitors of U.S. IT companies than it has for U.S. IT companies. South Asia has seized hold of SW-CMM certification as a key to successful outsourcing bids. Of the 80 or so SW-CMM Level-5 organizations in the world, 60 of these are on the Indian subcontinent. 
