You can tell a lot about a company by the discipline it practices. 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.

You can tell a lot about a company by the discipline it practices. 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.

You can tell a lot about a company by the discipline it practices. 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.

Executive Summary

This Executive Report provides practical advice on how to prepare your organization to take advantage of future changes in software. The software industry has been and will continue to be buffeted by fads and hyped information in addition to truly transformative technology.

This Executive Report provides practical advice on how to prepare your organization to take advantage of future changes in software. The software industry has been and will continue to be buffeted by fads and hyped information in addition to truly transformative technology.

The accompanying Executive Report provides practical advice on how to prepare your organization to take advantage of future changes in software. The software industry has been and will continue to be buffeted by fads and hyped information in addition to transformative technology.

If there is one group of people within your IT department that truly deserves respect, it is the one that performs the job of legacy data integration. Legacy data integration is a critical component of your enterprise application integration (EAI) efforts -- one that your organization must master if it is to succeed.

Every large company has hundreds of applications that were developed to solve one problem and are being used today for vastly different purposes. There's the accounting system that was designed to update customer accounts and generate statements that's now being used to provide online customers with information about their account balances.

It has become fashionable to design and develop business systems by starting in the middle, with the latest technological or e-commerce fads, which, supposedly, can solve most business problems.

Business intelligence (BI) decision-support initiatives are expensive cross-organizational endeavors. These initiatives involve extracting and merging disparate business data from online transaction processing systems, from batch systems, and from externally syndicated data sources.

Developing business intelligence (BI) decision-support applications is quite different than developing operational systems or even traditional decision-support systems. BI projects must deal with new tasks, technologies, tools, database designs, and integration requirements.

Business intelligence (BI) software can prevent your company from suffering the next Enron-like meltdown. BI software can even improve homeland security -- at least this is what some vendors' marketing claims purport.

Testing is an activity that we undertake to prove, at a minimum, that we are getting the functionality we expect and, ideally, that the application is robust. The more we test, the more we reduce the risk that the system will produce erroneous results or fail. But the risks we mitigate through testing are not the only risks we face when developing a new system.

Testing is an activity that we undertake to prove, at a minimum, that we are getting the functionality we expect and, ideally, that the application is robust. The more we test, the more we reduce the risk that the system will produce erroneous results or fail. But the risks we mitigate through testing are not the only risks we face when developing a new system.

Testing is an activity that we undertake to prove, at a minimum, that we are getting the functionality we expect and, ideally, that the application is robust. The more we test, the more we reduce the risk that the system will produce erroneous results or fail. But the risks we mitigate through testing are not the only risks we face when developing a new system.

Testing decisions always require tradeoffs between quality and cost. While additional testing increases software quality by reducing the likelihood of failure during operation, testing can be expensive. Test planning, execution, analysis, and correction add time and cost to any software project.

Testing decisions always require tradeoffs between quality and cost. While additional testing increases software quality by reducing the likelihood of failure during operation, testing can be expensive. Test planning, execution, analysis, and correction add time and cost to any software project.

Here are three hard-to-accept realities that you're probably trying to cope with:

Projects begin with high hopes and dreams, which gradually fade away as the quality of the software decays. This process cannot be inevitable. Where, how, when, and by whom should testing happen so we can feel better about a system after a year rather than after a month, and better yet after a decade?

Delivering software to specification and free of major defects has, I dare say, been a dicey endeavor for nearly as long as there has been software to deliver.