It's hard to open a newspaper these days and not read about the purported economic slowdown. Indeed, anything compared to the ferocious growth of the 1990s would suffer. Pressures brought about from these conditions make negotiation very difficult for IT organizations under the gun.

This article reports on the results of a Software Engineering Institute (SEI) study that looks at the effects of SEI-style software process maturity on duration, effort (cost), and quality. The results are revealing: using the median case, in going from SEI Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Level 1 to Level 2, a typical business application could save 10 months of development time, 75% of development expenses, and 75% of development errors.

In the 1980s, managers in most companies would have called an IT project with a US $10- or $20-million budget "large." Some really huge companies -- like General Motors, Exxon, or Ford -- did projects with $100-million-plus budgets, but those were pretty rare. In the 1990s though, things changed. Budgets skyrocketed.

Enterprise systems are very large computer systems that promise to replace major chunks of a company's applications infrastructure with an off-the-shelf, third-party package. In the early- to mid-1990s, they were primarily enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that focused on integrating the back-office, transaction-based subsystems required to run modern companies.

Whether to centralize or to decentralize is one of the perennial questions in IT. It never goes away; it just advances and recedes in an irregular cycle. Since this question is currently looming large in industry, this Executive Update analyzes data from Cutter Consortium's ongoing Business-IT Strategies Survey to explore the facets of decentralized IT.

Volume XI, No. 4; April 2001PDF Version

Executive Summary

Although most organizations today have some sort of firewall protecting their resources, many companies treat the firewall as a "checkbox" -- they think just having one is good enough to keep intruders out. Unfortunately, such an approach is a gross oversimplification of a complex topic.

The goal of the accompanying Executive Report is to introduce two technologies for securing your company's networks: firewalls and virtual private networks (VPNs).

An interesting report crossed my desk as I began to write this Executive Update. The report mentioned a large number of CIOs at a lecture on legacy to Web evolution who wanted less radical approaches to connecting e-business initiatives to their legacy systems. Why? The consensus was that the solutions on offer were too expensive and risky.

Supply chain management (SCM) has become a hot topic in the computer press and in executive boardrooms around the world. This is due to the move toward digital exchanges -- such as online industry trading hubs and other marketplaces -- and the acceptance of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce in general.

Having discussed a great deal of theory and a slew of products in the past few issues, I wanted to provide some examples of how organizations are applying data warehousing and business intelligence (BI). The following application studies were chosen because of the unique manner and/or domains in which BI is being applied.

In the March issue of BIA, I examined the concept of supply chain intelligence (SCI) and the requirements for applying business intelligence (BI) across an organization's supply chain operations.

© 2001 by Johanna Rothman. All rights reserved.

I recently spent two years programming and consulting in Switzerland. Switzerland is an excellent laboratory for studying and experiencing multicultural projects. With four official languages, the country itself is multicultural, and it draws technical talent from across the globe.

Every day, more and more organizations initiate projects that span national boundaries. For the project teams, they are generally great fun. Dealing with other people, other cultures, other mentalities, other food, and other drinks is certainly an attractive prospect. Or so they anticipate.

You are a certified project manager, with some years of experience and various successful projects. Now you are invited to manage a software project in a foreign country with a team including your usual staff as well as people at the client site.

Today many organizations, especially in the US and Europe, execute software projects at overseas locations. These are commonly referred to as "offshore projects," and they offer attractive benefits -- leveraging the skills and resources available in the offshore country to cut costs and meet deadlines.

In the early 1990s, Russian IT companies underwent a period of fast growth, which was caused by the rapid increase in demand for their services and the material absence of competition. At that time, most such companies employed accepted project management (PM) approaches similar to those offered by BAAN, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.

The only source of knowledge is experience. -- Albert Einstein

It's one thing to talk about being customer focused, it's quite another to actually do it.

During life's more rational moments, no software development executive will ever deny that customer satisfaction is an important goal to achieve. The question is, in the midst of quickly evolving technologies, escalating customer expectations, and increasing competitive pressures, how do you achieve it?

Attending yet another project management course seems to be a common reward for being part of a failed project. However, having served as a member of project teams, a project manager, a project director, and a member of several steering committees -- and having attended a number of project management courses -- I have begun to realize that most failures have little to do with the project manager's abilities.

In my last two Executive Updates (Vol. 2, Nos. 2 and 4), I profiled e-projects and analyzed their performance, along with the performance of current management practices.

It's hard to open a newspaper these days and not read about the purported economic slowdown. Indeed, anything compared to the ferocious growth of the 1990s would suffer. Pressures brought about from these conditions make negotiation very difficult for IT organizations under the gun.