Over the past year, Cutter Consortium has conducted research surveys on mainframe computing, e-business, and outsourcing. The mainframe computing survey asked questions such as: What roles do large mainframes play in mission-critical applications? What will be their role in the future? How will companies maintain staffing for mainframe support? What other platforms will play a key role? In this analysis, more than 35 large, worldwide IT organizations were queried to gauge the future of their mainframe architectures.

The company at center stage is a sizable manufacturing organization and is the largest employer in the area. It employs approximately 16,000 people worldwide and develops products for commercial, military, and government markets. Two of the company's product development business units have recently been assessed according to the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for Software at Level 3.

Every week, I read stories of another offshore software company assessed at the highest levels of process maturity based on the Capability Maturity Model (Software CMM) of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The photo that usually accompanies this story often shows youthful software developers standing with huge grins on their faces as though they have just won the lottery.

Every week, I read stories of another offshore software company assessed at the highest levels of process maturity based on the Capability Maturity Model (Software CMM) of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The photo that usually accompanies this story often shows youthful software developers standing with huge grins on their faces as though they have just won the lottery.

Recently, the high failure rates of customer relationship management (CRM) technology implementation have gotten a lot of coverage. Some sources cite failure rates as high as 70% in CRM system implementation. Even after successful technology implementation, CRM systems do not necessarily deliver the promised business benefits.

The accompanying Executive Report discusses the reasons for the high failure rates of customer relationship management (CRM) system implementations. It also recommends an approach to developing and implementing a customer-focused strategy that increases the chances of success.

E-learning seems to be the newest solution for all that ails business training programs, and it's inevitable that IT be challenged to adopt an approach to learning that leverages technology. Creating a strategy for e-learning is confusing, though, because it can take so many different forms. Walk through a vendor exhibit area at any training conference and it seems every vendor is selling an e-learning product.

We've talked a lot about how e-business is different. New technologies, 24/7 availability, worldwide access, and faster time to market are all ways that the e-business world is different. Most of these changes are concrete and therefore obvious. But e-business is different in intangible ways, too.

Recently, members of the Cutter Research Business Technology Trends Group (a focus group of IT managers) were asked to complete a study on the future of their mobile workforces. For this study, mobile professionals were defined as workers who are trying to access corporate information away from a physical corporate location.

Recently, members of the Cutter Research Business Technology Trends Group (a focus group of IT managers) were asked to complete a study on the future of their mobile workforces. For this study, mobile professionals were defined as workers who are trying to access corporate information away from a physical corporate location.

Volume XI, No. 5; May 2001PDF VersionExecutive Summary

The biggest challenge faced by many organizations conducting business on the Web is maintaining a successful Web site. Successful Web sites attract large volumes of hits, and large volumes of hits stress the software that runs the site. It's not uncommon for sites to be accessed millions of times a day.

There's little doubt about the impact of the Internet in the past decade; it has been profound, forever changing the way people use computers, access information, and do business. Not as widely recognized is the impact the Internet has had on software development and IT systems. The impact on software professionals, practices, and technology is just as profound.

Increasingly, companies are turning to component-based development to create new applications. A few years ago, most companies were still doing object and component development in special groups and applying the techniques to carefully selected tasks. However, since the late 1990s, with the rise of the Internet and Java, component-based techniques have pretty much swept away the competition.

Agile modeling (AM), formerly known as extreme modeling (XM), describes a collection of values, principles, and practices for effective modeling of software systems. The approaches promoted by AM can be used to improve most software development projects, particularly those focused on the creation of business software, regardless of the software process that the project team has adopted.

I am currently the application architect on a project whose purpose is to accept service orders from Web clients and implement those orders by triggering workflows in back-end legacy systems. The exact details of the client or the application are unimportant. What's important is that this is a typical enterprise application integration (EAI) scenario -- using a Web client to invoke end-to-end transactions via a workflow middle layer that ultimately uses back-end resources to perform its work.

Unless you've been stuck aboard the International Space Station for the past few days, you've probably heard that IBM is buying Informix Software's database business for a cool US $1 billion in cash. Lots of people have commented as to what this deal means in general for the database market, but what does it portend for IBM's data warehousing and BI business, as well as for the BI market in general?

Business intelligence (BI) is the set of processes and data structures used to understand a company's business environment in order to support strategic analysis and decisionmaking. The major components of BI are the data warehouse, data marts, decision support interface, and processes to collect data into the data warehouse and deliver it to the business community.

Business intelligence (BI) is the set of processes and data structures used to understand a company's business environment and support strategic analysis and decisionmaking. The accompanying Executive Report describes the business value that BI capabilities provide, the architecture needed to support the environment, and a sound approach for building and managing it.

This past February, a war of words erupted between the shoe manufacturer Nike, Inc. and i2 Technologies, the software developer that provided Nike with a new demand-and-supply inventory system.

It seems as though you can hardly open a business or IT magazine without running across a vendor or company hyping customer relationship management (CRM). Unfortunately, opinions vary considerably concerning the real value of undertaking CRM initiatives. Opinions swing just as wildly as to what goals or trends are driving corporate CRM initiatives and what benefits organizations are hoping to gain from them. Moreover, depending on whom you talk to, companies are either enamored with their CRM initiatives or extremely disillusioned due to high failure rates.