The phrase early adopter comes from Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm (HarperBusiness, 1991), in which he describes the uptake of new technologies.

It's Tuesday morning, still dark. Monday has passed and already you feel behind. The parking lot is empty. Perfect. You can get some real work done before the barrage begins. As you sip your first cup of office coffee (too bad Starbucks doesn't open this early), you start the routine. First, review your calendar for the day. It's light, but that will change by 9 am.

Globalization has erased the boundaries of night and day, expanded the languages in which we do business, and provided us with more opportunities for new business and competition. Education breeds new ideas and disciplines that are continuously adopted by business, expanding the capabilities of every person and eliminating the ancient concept that only a select few are fit to lead.

Business-IT alignment has received a lot of ink through the years. The latest research from Cutter Consortium shows that most companies regard their business-IT alignment as good. But this research also shows that business-IT alignment is a problem for these same companies. This Executive Update presents these findings and highlights some ways that companies can alter traditional IT practices to improve business-IT alignment.

The bloom is gone from the e-business rose. No longer is e-business the darling of the business press. No longer is e-business new, novel, and exciting. Today, e-business is commonplace. E-business is expected. E-business is simply the way certain things are done.

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.

The latest buzzword in the software industry is "Web services." Web services will become an important element of the new and future generation of distributed and e-business systems and are a natural evolution in the maturity of the software industry.

Web services will become an important element of the future generation of distributed and e-business systems.

The recent Executive Update on e-business architectures ( Vol. 4, No. 18) was the first in a series of updates that will report on the findings of an ongoing Cutter Consortium e-business survey. This survey aims to see whether companies are undertaking e-business projects and, if so, how they are architecting these projects.

I began reviewing Cutter Consortium's recent e-business survey this past September. In Executive Update Vol. 4, No. 18, I reported that 74% of respondents (some 140 companies once I eliminated software companies and consultants from our sample) were firmly committed to e-business as a key part of their corporate strategies.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a very popular topic in today's business environment. Hit any Web search engine with the initials "CRM" and you are likely to generate hundreds (or even thousands) of responses.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a very popular topic in today's business environment. Hit any Web search engine with the initials "CRM" and you are likely to generate hundreds (or even thousands) of responses.

Cutter Consortium continues to survey companies about their customer relationship management (CRM) practices. In this month's Executive Update, we discuss findings from our survey of 159 participants designed to measure and assess corporate views on a number of CRM issues, including:

There has been an increasing interest in and awareness of requirements. There are conferences devoted to the topic of requirements, many articles and books have been published on the subject, and our consulting experience shows us that organizations are prepared to invest effort in improving their requirements processes. This report discusses what requirements are and why they are such an important ingredient in project management.

When you base a project plan on the requirements, you gain many advantages. You put yourself in a powerful position because the map (the plan) matches the terrain (the real requirements).

In this Executive Update, we complete our look at the issues involved in the agile versus heavy methodology debate, drawing on data from Cutter Consortium's ongoing surveys.

"Why should we spend time on a project review?" the support manager asked. "Last time we did a 'lessons learned' meeting in an hour. And even that was a waste of time. We just make a list of what we learned and never look at it again."

Note: The present Council Opinion is the first of three on the subject of a pandemic -- an extensive disruption of our information infrastructure due to natural or malicious causes. The overall assertion is that such a pandemic is likely in our near future and that companies, governments, and economies need to take steps to buffer themselves from pandemic effects.

Note: The present Council Opinion is the first of three on the subject of a pandemic -- an extensive disruption of our information infrastructure due to natural or malicious causes. The overall assertion is that such a pandemic is likely in our near future and that companies, governments, and economies need to take steps to buffer themselves from pandemic effects.

Note: The present Council Opinion is the first of three on the subject of a pandemic -- an extensive disruption of our information infrastructure due to natural or malicious causes. The overall assertion is that such a pandemic is likely in our near future and that companies, governments, and economies need to take steps to buffer themselves from pandemic effects.

Security

It's been about three decades since the first promises about voice recognition were made by researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA -- the same Defense Department agency that created the underlying technology for the Internet).

It's been about three decades since the first promises about voice recognition were made by researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA -- the same Defense Department agency that created the underlying technology for the Internet).