Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a corporate strategy that is gaining in popularity.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a corporate strategy that is gaining in popularity.

When the United Nations launched a new effort under its Global Compact, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told participants at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF):

When the United Nations launched a new effort under its Global Compact, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told participants at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF):

Architecture

Architecture

One of the wise decisions the Object Management Group (OMG) made when it standardized on UML in the late 1990s was to focus only on notation and to ignore specific methodological issues. That kept UML independent of any specific methodology, and it provided time for methodologies to evolve.

You can tell a lot about a company by the discipline it practices [1]. Some companies perform due diligence, while others make decisions based on what the brother-in-law thinks. There are also consultants who will tell you how to think -- for a price, of course.

Over the years, many large companies have used the Object Management Group's (OMG) CORBA middleware to link large enterprise applications. The leading vendor of CORBA -- IONA -- for example, claims it has more than 4,500 customers that rely on CORBA solutions. In many cases these are the same applications that companies are now considering integrating via the Internet to create Web services.

There's been a lot of talk at data warehousing conferences and in the press (and by the extraction, transformation, and loading [ETL] tool vendors) about the need to update and refresh data warehouses in real time. In practice, however, few organizations are currently conducting real-time (or near real-time) data warehouse updates and refreshments.