Most great athletes are born with great reaction times. Their ability to run faster, hit a ball farther, or avoid a tackle is often predicated on the fact that their neural system is simply faster than their opponents'. In a sense, the same thing is true about enterprises. Great businesses also seem to have great reaction times.

Most great athletes are born with great reaction times. Their ability to run faster, hit a ball farther, or avoid a tackle is often predicated on the fact that their neural system is simply faster than their opponents'. In a sense, the same thing is true about enterprises. Great businesses also seem to have great reaction times.

Historically, technology has always had a major impact on how businesses do business. The invention of the telegraph 150 years ago revolutionized how organizations communicated. It also made it possible for organizations to grow larger than had been possible before, coordinate over greater geographical spaces, and react faster.

Immediately following September 11, articles began appearing in the computer press saying that in order to prevent further terrorist attacks it was essential to provide the intelligence, law enforcement, customs, immigration, and other US government agencies with better data integration and sharing capabilities.

Immediately following September 11, articles began appearing in the computer press saying that in order to prevent further terrorist attacks it was essential to provide the intelligence, law enforcement, customs, immigration, and other US government agencies with better data integration and sharing capabilities.

The movement toward e-business has involved a gradual evolution toward Web-enablement of all IT services and systems within the enterprise, integration of services, and centralization of access and management through a Web browser. This movement has coincided with advances in data analysis techniques to a point where diverse techniques applied to data stores might be deemed "business intelligence" (BI).

Enterprise portals, though variously defined, are now achieving importance as a central integration point for the diverse information sources available in networked enterprise environments. Despite recent media focus, and some prominent attempts to fix a definition, enterprise portals have actually existed since the first intranets based on early Web technologies were placed on corporate networks.

Although a great deal of attention has been devoted to the subject of designing and building software, fairly little attention has been spent on the problem of designing and building software projects. Yet there are few software practitioners who would argue that the structure and operation of the software project are not important.

Software projects, like construction projects in the building industry, come in various sizes. Consider the following examples from the construction industry: