Last month, I wrote that Oracle Corporation sucked the air out of the other BI vendors' lungs when it announced it would buy business performance management/OLAP database vendor Hyperion Solutions (see "Upping the Ante, Oracle Buys Hyperion," 6 March 2007).

Warfare is often merely ontological.

Rightly or wrongly, Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that is predictably precipitating a bit of warfare. People are arguing over how we ought to describe the world. And in every struggle, there are three main participants: protagonists who optimistically push forward, antagonists who skeptically critique the protagonists, and idle bystanders who either dismiss the significance of the entire scuffle or revel in the ensuing mud bath.

Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that inevitably has people taking sides. Today, it appears most corporate enterprises are looking at Web 2.0 with a bit of bewilderment, if not some detachment. After all, the main participants in Web 2.0 are considerably younger than the executives who must make decisions regarding it. Many CIOs simply don't use technology in quite the same way as teenagers and young adults do and hence are not immersed in the Web 2.0 culture.

In the world of information technology, the word "legacy" has anything but positive connotations. It brings to mind complex, hard-to-maintain applications; aging, less-than-efficient technologies; high operating costs; and lack of flexibility and responsiveness to business change. IT executives and staff members see not valuable business assets, but a series of challenges that somehow must be supported until they can be replaced.

In the world of IT, the word "legacy" has anything but positive connotations. It brings to mind complex, hard-to-maintain applications; aging, less-than-efficient technologies; high operating costs; and lack of flexibility and responsiveness to business change. Too often, IT executives and staff consider legacy systems to be a drain of investment dollars from development efforts rather than valuable business assets that can be effectively managed.

Massive shifts in e-commerce, collaborative work environments, and global operations make information technologies the very machinery of current commercial operations. IT plays an important role in strategic planning, and cost-effective implementation of the right IT investments creates competitive advantage.

For many years, the Object Management Group (OMG), a major industry consortium focused on open computing standards, has played a key role in the development of groundbreaking standards in all areas of software engineering, including model driven development (MDD), software development processes (SDPs), enterprise architecture (EA), and systems integration (SI). Recently, OMG has been making major efforts to integrate all of these standards under its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative.

For many years, the Object Management Group (OMG) has played a key role in the development of groundbreaking standards in all areas of software engineering, including model driven development (MDD), software development processes (SDPs), enterprise architecture (EA), and systems integration. Recently, OMG has been making major efforts to integrate all of these standards under its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative.

In Part I (Vol. 10, No. 8) of this two-part Executive Update series on rich Internet applications (RIAs, pronounced ree-ahs), I lamented the way that the Web app tsunami set back user interface evolution by almost a decade, derailing architectural thinking and tossing us back to an essentially forms-based interface. But the situation is rapidly improving.

In this issue of CBR, we tap the expertise of three "in-world" pioneers and experts. Based on their experience both consulting with companies that have staked a claim in-world and their own firsthand experiences, they help us understand the basic characteristics and the potential of the 3D Internet and virtual worlds -- or multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), as they are more precisely called.

Harnessing emerging information technologies to organization strategy and processes is one of the vexing challenges IT management faces. Candidate technologies must first be identified: sometimes these can bubble up from within the IT group; in other cases, executives rip articles out of business magazines and drop them on the CIO's desk. Perhaps your company is fortunate to have a group or individual assigned with scanning for value-adding emerging technologies. Whatever the source of the inspiration, management then must assess the potential future business implications.

MUVEs? MMORPGs? VSWs? How is it that with acronyms as obscure and tortuous as this, the 3D Internet (3Di) has become white-hot in terms of press coverage? BusinessWeek, Fortune, Wired, the New York Times, Good Morning America, CBS Sunday Morning, and even South Park have covered some aspect of the 3D Internet in recent months.

This issue was a lot of fun to write. The topic, multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), and the company brought out the big kid in me -- we got to play around again for a while. Yet you should not let the playful component and applications of these technologies fool you. There is potential here for tangible value creation and appropriation, and many firms are already experimenting with these technologies. This is our focus in this issue of CBR: an exploration of the characteristics and the potential offered by MUVEs to modern organizations.

This survey examined current business attitudes toward and future uses of virtual worlds and online role-playing environments. Fifty-six percent of the 105 respondents come from organizations headquartered or based in North America, 18% from organizations in Europe, 11% each from organizations in Asia and Australia/Pacific, and the remainder from organizations in other regions.

Warfare is often merely ontological.

Rightly or wrongly, Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that is predictably precipitating a bit of warfare. People are arguing over how we ought to describe the world. And in every struggle, there are three main participants: protagonists who optimistically push forward, antagonists who skeptically critique the protagonists, and idle bystanders who either dismiss the significance of the entire scuffle or revel in the ensuing mud bath.

Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that inevitably has people taking sides. Today, it appears most corporate enterprises are looking at Web 2.0 with a bit of bewilderment, if not some detachment. After all, the main participants in Web 2.0 are considerably younger than the executives who must make decisions regarding it. Many CIOs simply don't use technology in quite the same way as teenagers and young adults do and hence are not immersed in the Web 2.0 culture.

This is the second in a three-part series of Executive Updates on data management and analysis. In Part I (Vol. 7, No.

This is the second in a three-part series of Executive Updates on data management and analysis. In Part I (Vol. 7, No.

"There is a lack of easy-to-access war stories about how agility works in areas outside the traditional domains of agile projects. Yet reports from real projects are exactly what managers need to decide whether they want to use agility beyond the well-trodden paths."

-- Jens Coldewey, Guest Editor

Software development today is heavily influenced by large companies with a desire for a global presence. Growth happens through mergers and acquisitions and new development in emerging markets. The availability and lower cost of trained software resources in new areas have prompted an increasing amount of outsourcing. Thus, software professionals frequently face having to work as a manager or member of a distributed team.

Today there are not many projects left that are developed "at home" without outsourcing or offshoring. Yet more and more projects are discovering that agile software development -- which emphasizes face-to-face communication -- is a critical success factor. How can these two trends be squared?

This article describes the development of the Zeus,1 an anesthesia workstation for use in operating rooms. For the duration of a surgery, the Zeus supplies the patient with breathing gases, with active ventilation, and with narcotics both inhaled and intravenous. At the same time, the patient's life signals and the Zeus machine parameters are monitored. During a surgery, the patient's life is highly dependent on the medical staff and on the quality and safety concepts of the medical devices.

When introducing an agile approach to IT development into an environment that has known only a structured, start-to-finish, planned approach, you will likely encounter resistance. Thus, you will find yourself needing to compromise and adapt your methodological approach, to institute control points we call "traffic cops," and to learn to depict what you are delivering in a way that proponents of the previous "waterfall" methodology will not just understand but also accept.

Many software development organizations have a growing realization that they need a more formal process than "seat of the pants." They are aware that many development methods are overly bureaucratic and unhelpful, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. They hear that agile processes may help, but how do they make the transition to a modern-day process? How do they determine how much agility the agile processes on offer today really possess? How do they determine how much agility they need, anyway?

As a manager, ask yourself this question: "Do I manage using techniques that are decades old and assume that changes in the business environment occur at a very slow pace?" Of course you don't. Today, change is the only constant in business, and the companies that are best able to accommodate and even embrace change are the most successful.