Do you know what your company's strategies, goals, and objectives are? If so, you are already on the road toward alignment. Do your decisions, actions, and daily efforts promote these goals? If so, congratulations -- you are skilled at maintaining alignment.

Say you're the vice president of IT in a major corporation, and your customers are looking for consistently high-performance, continuous improvement, and state-of-the-art technical solutions that satisfy their ever-changing business.

Say you're the vice president of IT in a major corporation, and your customers are looking for consistently high-performance, continuous improvement, and state-of-the-art technical solutions that satisfy their ever-changing business.

The discipline of risk management is explicitly focused on endeavors where the unknowns are large and potentially critical. This has always been the character of IT projects, but through the 1990s, the principles of risk management have frequently been honored only in the breach: organizations doing risky IT work routinely understated the extent of their risks in order to prolong funding.

Editor's note: An assertion from the Cutter Consortium Business Technology Council states, "Groupware will come into its own (or at least the need for it). This includes shared whiteboards, document control over the extranet, effective cross-organizational to-do lists, e-mail improvements, and improved intranets."

Editor's note: An assertion from the Cutter Consortium Business Technology Council states, "Groupware will come into its own (or at least the need for it). This includes shared whiteboards, document control over the extranet, effective cross-organizational to-do lists, e-mail improvements, and improved intranets."

In the past few years, the explosion of the Internet has propelled instant messaging (IM) from chat room fixture to boardroom issue. The dramatic growth of consumer IM services (from AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and others) has triggered a secondary effect: IM has gone corporate.

In the past few years, the explosion of the Internet has propelled instant messaging (IM) from chat room fixture to boardroom issue. The dramatic growth of consumer IM services (from AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and others) has triggered a secondary effect: IM has gone corporate.

Second-generation systematic and people-centric knowledge management (KM) is regularly pursued by proactive enterprises throughout the world. Companies, public institutions, and military organizations are among those that benefit from KM. However, not all attempts at pursuing KM are successful. Often, efforts fail to live up to expectations and managers wonder why.

Second-generation systematic and people-centric knowledge management (KM) is regularly pursued by proactive enterprises throughout the world. Companies, public institutions, and military organizations are among those that benefit from KM. However, not all attempts at pursuing KM are successful. Often, efforts fail to live up to expectations and managers wonder why.

Mark Cotteleer and Laura Richards, contributing authors for Cutter's Business-IT Strategies Advisory Service, have been doing a series of articles on customer relationship management (CRM) and I've been reading them with interest.

In our prior Business-IT Strategies E-Mail Advisor ( 9 January 2002), we introduced a discussion of our view that history matters when implementing customer relationship management (CRM) in the context of previous (or ongoing) enterprise resource planning (ERP) efforts.

In our prior Business-IT Strategies E-Mail Advisor ( 9 January 2002), we introduced a discussion of our view that history matters when implementing customer relationship management (CRM) in the context of previous (or ongoing) enterprise resource planning (ERP) efforts.

IBM has been running commercials on TV and ads in major magazines arguing that senior executives need to learn about infrastructure. The basic ad, for example has a headline that says:

75% OF ALL IT DOLLARS GO TO INFRASTRUCTURE: Isn't it time you learned what it is?

In a recent IEEE Software column (Goth, G., "Federal Government Calls for More Secure Software Design," IEEE Software, Volume 10 Number 1, January/February 2002, pp.