Bruce Taylor spoke with Tom DeMarco, principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, on the state of communications and interaction in the IT workplace today. This is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here.

I'm Bruce Taylor and this is Voices on ITworld. My guest today is Tom DeMarco. Tom is a Principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, a consultancy specializing in the complex processes of system building. He's also a fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council, serves on the editorial board of the Cutter IT Journal, and is a Senior Consultant with Cutter's Agile Software Development and Project Management Practice and the Enterprise Risk Management and Governance Practice. He was the winner of the 1986 Warnier Prize for lifetime contribution to the field of computing and the 1999 Wayne Stevens Prize for contribution to software methods. His best selling books include: The Deadline, a novel about project management and Slack: Getting Beyond Burnout, Busy Work, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. He co-authored with Tim Lister the celebrated and classic text, Peopleware, Productive Projects and Teams, as well as the ultimate how-to book on risk management and software projects, entitled Waltzing with Bears. Tom is a frequent consultant and lecturer throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Far East.

Bruce Taylor: Tom, welcome to the program.

Tom DeMarco: Thank you, Bruce.

Taylor: Tom, you recently wrote an opinion for the Cutter Consortium's business technology counsel on the state of communications and interaction in the IT workplace today and in that opinion, you state what, to me, is the painful and obvious Dilbert-like truth that in the IT workplace, and I'd offer in every workplace, everybody is in far too many meetings and unhappy about it. So that's our jumping off point for this conversation. What, in your opinion, is the actual condition that exists in most IT shops, and how'd we get here.

DeMarco: Well, as you say, it isn't just IT, it's in general knowledge work. And the symptom that I observe is that in an age in which there's kind of a mantra, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. We have this notion that the 21st century is one in which we either speed up or perish. In this hurry up age companies are slowing down. They're slowing down while they're focusing all their energy on speeding up. And the mechanism by which they're slowing down is perversely tied to the mechanism that they're trying to invoke to speed up. They're spending their time in endless meetings. Meetings today are more a characteristic of the workplace than work. They spend their time in endless meetings, they have hundreds of e-mails. And all of these things are not work. You might say, oh my work is e-mail. E-mail is not work, e-mail is the coordination of work. Meetings are not work, meetings are the coordination of work. And what I observed is that people in knowledge work today are spending more

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