This is the first DEA E-Mail Advisor of the new year. In the last Advisor, I tried to summarize the major events for 2001. In this issue, I want to take a crack at predicting the major events for 2002. Obviously, given the scope of this Advisor, I'm not going to try to predict political, economic, or business trends, in general, but will stick with a narrow range of technological and IT developments.

By nearly a 3-to-2 margin, respondents to our business-IT strategies survey say that their e-business initiatives improved business-IT alignment.

Many studies have been devoted to new requirements devolving from the advent of the Internet Age, particularly the needs to manage fast and constant change and for 24/7 resilience. Yet the role of testing in all this has been strangely neglected. In this Executive Report, we explain why testing strategies also need to change, and how.

Many studies have been devoted to new requirements devolving from the advent of the Internet Age, particularly the needs to manage fast and constant change and for 24/7 resilience. Yet the role of testing in all this has been strangely neglected. In this Executive Report, we explain why testing strategies also need to change, and how.

The accompanying Executive Report presents the case for a more holistic, enterprise-wide approach to IT testing, contained within an envelope of business risk management.

The accompanying Executive Report presents the case for a more holistic, enterprise-wide approach to IT testing, contained within an envelope of business risk management.

The reason why enterprises pursue systematic knowledge management (KM) is clear: they wish to make people -- and the whole enterprise -- act intelligently to operate more effectively and better satisfy their stakeholders. However, the practical issue of how to approach introducing or expanding the KM practice is complex.

September 11 changed many things. Our personal lives have changed as much -- if not more -- than our professional lives. Some years ago, I had to beg for more money to enhance a security infrastructure. Why should we spend so much money on a "low-probability event?" I was asked. Do we really need such a large off-site contingency facility? How will we pay for all this stuff? Today, it would be easy.

September 11 changed many things. Our personal lives have changed as much -- if not more -- than our professional lives. Some years ago, I had to beg for more money to enhance a security infrastructure. Why should we spend so much money on a "low-probability event?" I was asked. Do we really need such a large off-site contingency facility? How will we pay for all this stuff? Today, it would be easy.

How do people make decisions? To make a business decision -- be it strategic, tactical, or operational -- people use information that they consider to be relevant. A lot of information is provided and used by modern-day, ubiquitous information technology. However, information and data without context and shared meaning are useless.

Business and IT organizations often express themselves in very different ways. To create information management systems that serve the needs of complex, nontrivial and rapidly changing businesses, effective communication is imperative. To communicate effectively, a small set of shared, clearly defined concepts and constructs is essential.

Cutter Consortium has recently conducted a survey of more than 170 companies worldwide1 for its Distributed Enterprise Architecture Advisory Service. This Executive Update -- the first in a series based on these survey results -- focuses on a rather dramatic finding about the Object Management Group (OMG) as it relates to the plans of the companies in this survey.

Knowledge management (KM) provides approaches and means for enterprises to create, transfer, and apply knowledge deliberately and systematically. KM is credited with creating practices and systems that allow people to work more effectively to great advantage for their enterprises.

The collected effectiveness of people at all levels of the enterprise "rolls up" into the performance of the enterprise itself. Improved business performance results from the improved effectiveness of people.