There will be a lot written about the fact that the US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated the decision, made last year by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, to break up Microsoft. Aside from the circuit court being upset with Judge Jackson for talking to the press, in essence telling them how upset he was with Microsoft, the decision focuses on three things:

Many organizations have come to the conclusion that outsourcing can decrease costs and improve internal and external levels of service. They also believe that outsourcing noncore activities enables them to concentrate on what they do best and that outsourcing therefore is a desirable way to encourage organizational success.

Many organizations have come to the conclusion that outsourcing can decrease costs and improve internal and external levels of service. They also believe that outsourcing noncore activities enables them to concentrate on what they do best and that outsourcing therefore is a desirable way to encourage organizational success.

Many organizations have come to the conclusion that outsourcing can decrease costs and improve internal and external levels of service. They also believe that outsourcing noncore activities enables them to concentrate on what they do best and that outsourcing therefore is a desirable way to encourage organizational success.

The first wave of wireless applications will focus on business intelligence, according to Cutter Consortium.

Many organizations have come to the conclusion that outsourcing can decrease costs and improve internal and external levels of service. They also believe that outsourcing noncore activities enables them to concentrate on what they do best and that outsourcing therefore is a desirable way to encourage organizational success.

Many organizations have come to the conclusion that outsourcing can decrease costs and improve internal and external levels of service. They also believe that outsourcing noncore activities enables them to concentrate on what they do best and that outsourcing therefore is a desirable way to encourage organizational success.

Fast-changing times demand adaptability. With ever-tighter deadlines and the constant newness of technical challenges, it's often difficult to size projects. Even as times change, this fundamental problem remains. Many want to know whether sizing metrics that we learned in the past, such as function points, are adaptable to new and different environments.

It's been going on for years: the notion that every time a new technology, methodology, or approach comes on the software scene, we need new metrics to manage the software project. Although it is definitely true that new technologies bring differences in productivity and quality, there are some metrics that never go out of style -- because the fundamental principles on which they are based have not changed.

"Getting people to do better all the worthwhile things they ought to be doing anyway." That is the language with which Philip B. Crosby began his now famous book Quality is Free: The Art of Making Quality Certain (McGraw-Hill, 1979). "People" includes management, he went on to say, but it is up to the professionals in a field to instruct management about this portion of the management job. What can management do to make software quality more certain?

Software projects are notorious for being late, over budget, and delivered with poor reliability. In the past this has often been due to ambitious attempts to take on the construction of large amounts of functionality within very aggressive market deadlines. Increasingly, one solution involves partitioning large release projects into smaller subsystems, each developed by separate smaller teams. Then the subsystems are integrated and validated to provide the final product release.

There's an old saying that to really understand someone you have to walk a mile in his or her shoes. The underlying lesson is simple: you need to gain that person's perspective if you are to grasp his or her needs and issues. Without perspective, the best we can do is speculate about needs, intents, and motives. Alignment, if it occurs at all, is accidental.

IT professionals are constantly feeling pressure to become better aligned with the business areas they support. Far too little time is spent explaining why alignment is important and how to go about becoming better aligned. The accompanying Executive Report aims to fill these voids and give IT professionals practical advice for seeking and attaining alignment with the business of their company.

We're in a period of belt-tightening -- cutting expenses, reducing staff, and decreasing the number of projects we're working on. Managing our project portfolios is one of the hardest problems in IT, and one of the most necessary, because there are always more possible projects than there are people and time to do them.

Respondents to Cutter Consortium's latest Business-IT Strategies Survey, which focuses on e-business and IT alignment, tend to take a formal approach to IT in general and e-business in particular. This is reflected in the fact that 81% of respondents have a formal IT strategy, and 57% have a formal e-business strategy.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) represents a simple initiative to provide a data representation for the Web. In just a few short years, XML has revolutionized data and communications across the Internet. XML is now a flexible data storage medium for delivering specialized content to browsers and handheld wireless computing devices.

In just a few short years, the Extensible Markup Language (XML), a simple data description language, has significantly changed how we think about data and communicate across the Internet. Content providers are looking to XML as a flexible data storage medium for delivering specialized content to browsers and handheld wireless computing devices.

There's no shortage of Extensible Markup Language (XML) hype these days, but it's nevertheless a very new standard. In most cases, when people talk about XML, they are assuming it can do things that are well beyond the basic XML standard issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). I've argued that there are really four issues to consider:

In the last Executive Update I wrote on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), I focused on core XML updates DOM and Schema. This month, I want to focus on broader architectural issues. I've already discussed the fact that XML can serve two functions: it can pass text between human users or pass data between software applications.