I spent a recent airplane flight between Chicago and San Francisco reading a new survey of workflow systems. The book was the Workflow Handbook 2002 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0970350902/cutterinformatco).

The importance of data quality for data warehousing and BI has received considerable attention in the industry. But what are companies actually doing to ensure the quality of their data for their data warehousing and BI initiatives? That is the question we sought to answer.

The importance of data quality for data warehousing and BI has received considerable attention in the industry. But what are companies actually doing to ensure the quality of their data for their data warehousing and BI initiatives? That is the question we sought to answer.

Many of the traditional reasons for considering outsourcing are still driving today's sourcing decisions.

Many of the traditional reasons for considering outsourcing are still driving today's sourcing decisions.

For e-business, this is a good thing. It means that e-business is maturing. It means that e-business doesn't have to live up to a bunch of unrealistic hype. It means that e-business has won its spurs. Most important, it means that e-business is here to stay.

This Executive Report introduces the concepts and reasons for the rapid growth of Web services for the corporate intranet, extranets, and the Internet. It begins with a nontechnical introduction, relating Web services to other more familiar technologies. It then discusses the concepts of Web services in more technical detail, with some typical examples and applications.

Web services and associated XML technologies have recently been developed to address real time program and code module integration that is both language- and platform-independent. With Web services, APIs, input messages, and output messages are defined using XML.

In Part I of this Executive Update (Vol. 5, No. 4), we looked at the investments we're all making in applications infrastructure, specifically, object-oriented (OO) databases, enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, content management platforms, portals, data warehouses, and data mining tools.

A lot of us are finally very concerned about security. We've already documented this increased awareness and commitment to just about all aspects of security (see Business-IT Strategies Executive Update, Vol. 5, No. 2). But what technologies are we looking at? Which ones should we buy? Which ones are likely to become "standard"?

Editor's note: This Executive Report is the second in a two-part series on enterprise integration (EI). The first, "Enterprise Integration: Business's New Frontier" (see Distributed Enterprise Architecture Executive Report, Vol. 4, No. 12), covers the rationale and architecture for enterprise integration.

A Web service is a programmable entity that provides a particular element of functionality, such as application logic, and is accessible to any number of potentially disparate systems through the use of Internet standards, such as XML and HTTP.

As the next revolutionary advancement of the Internet, Web services will become the fundamental structure that links together all computing devices.

The idea of the Semantic Web first became popular with the publication of an article by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila in the May 2001 issue of Scientific American (" The Semantic Web," www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html).