During the 1980s, my biggest client was a telephone company. I remember one day talking to a top executive with this company about what he considered to be his most serious technology problem. He didn't even think about it, he just blurted out: "The billing system by a long ways. We can create new telecommunication products much faster than we can figure out how to bill for them."

In the mid-1990s, a company named Zeos assembled PCs in my home state of Minnesota. I was impressed when Zeos was named as a finalist for the Malcolm Baldrige Award because competing for this quality award is more or less the equivalent of a software company trying to reach CMM Level 5.

Over the past few years, enterprise and operational risk management activities in many sectors have evolved from information gathering to a functional discipline with dedicated staff using established formal policies and both quantitative and qualitative procedures.

While the world has been in the economic doldrums and most IT companies have been reporting lousy earnings, IBM Software Division has been buying and innovating. It has been interesting to watch IBM execute this strategy, drawing on its deep cash reserves, while others simply hunker down and wait for the wind to fill their sails again.

While the world has been in the economic doldrums and most IT companies have been reporting lousy earnings, IBM Software Division has been buying and innovating. It has been interesting to watch IBM execute this strategy, drawing on its deep cash reserves, while others simply hunker down and wait for the wind to fill their sails again.

While the world has been in the economic doldrums and most IT companies have been reporting lousy earnings, IBM Software Division has been buying and innovating. It has been interesting to watch IBM execute this strategy, drawing on its deep cash reserves, while others simply hunker down and wait for the wind to fill their sails again.

In early 2003, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey to help answer this question. The results are analyzed in this issue of CBR .