One of the interesting presentations at the Object Management Group's (OMG) E-Business Application Integration (EAI) workshop in Orlando, Florida, USA, in January was given by Colonel Lawrence Sweeney, US Air Force. Sweeney is the joint program manager of the Department of Defense's (DOD) Space and Naval Warfare Information Technology Center (SPAWAR ITC) project.

Late last year, I wrote an article about ensuring appropriate business cases exist for projects (" Benefits: Not As Intangible As You Think!", Cutter IT E-Mail Advisor, 22 November 2000).

When two of IBM's biggest competitors, Amdahl and Hitachi, announced they were withdrawing from the mainframe market, Cutter Consortium decided to look into the current demand of mainframes.

A variant of a quote from Dwight Eisenhower goes something like: the value of the plan is not in the plan itself, but in the planning. As we think about putting together good sourcing activities -- whether acquiring a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) package, outsourcing some development work, or outsourcing a whole IT organization -- planning is critical.

A variant of a quote from Dwight Eisenhower goes something like: the value of the plan is not in the plan itself, but in the planning. As we think about putting together good sourcing activities -- whether acquiring a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) package, outsourcing some development work, or outsourcing a whole IT organization -- planning is critical.

With all of the gloomy stories about the dot-com collapse, you might get the impression that the high-tech jobs associated with all of those failed companies have vanished. If pets.com and this.com and that.com have all gone bankrupt, then will we really need all of those Java programmers? If the dot-com industry has laid off 20,000-30,000 people in the past year, are they all still unemployed?

Well, not a startup exactly.

I have recently been closely involved with an organization that is incubating a new Web-based service business within a much larger company. An "internal startup," if you like.

Well, not a startup exactly.

I have recently been closely involved with an organization that is incubating a new Web-based service business within a much larger company. An "internal startup," if you like.

If business projects are part of your profession, you know that many projects fail to live up to their potential. Some projects fail to achieve their schedule or budget goals or fail to deliver everything initially promised. Other projects simply fail altogether. Many of the problems faced by projects can be avoided, or at least contained, by effective project management practices.

Well, not a startup exactly.

Well, not a startup exactly.

This issue continues discussions started in January on organizational learning and defect inspections, specifically focusing on organizational issues and how to deal with emotions and tensions in a high-pressure IT environment. The word metrics implies an objective, sterile view of our working world. The notion of benchmarks seems safe -- after all, they're simply charts and graphs that tell us the state of our IT programs.

My article on metrics and organizational learning in last month's ITMS described how excellent companies leverage ideas and collective thought processes to learn faster than their competitors and to compete more effectively. These sentiments have been promoted by John Chambers of Cisco, Alan Webber of Fast Company magazine, and John Perry Barlow (during a recent keynote address at the Pop!Tech 2000). I wrote about the following ideas:

In Part 1 of this article, I described defect metrics and the behavior patterns that have become evident through scientific research on software projects (see CBR, January 2001). Metrics on defect-find rates throughout a project's lifecycle (from the early design phases to deployment) show a buildup to a maximum peak, followed by a gradual decline characterized by a long tail.

Integration is one of the leading initiatives in the IT industry today. Many analysts believe that without a workable enterprise integration plan, e-business deployment and business-to-business (B2B) integration will suffer considerably.

Integration may mean many things to various stakeholders within an enterprise. To IT, it may mean connecting Web-based front ends to legacy systems. To business analysts, it may mean getting the same answer to the same inquiry across multiple business units. To customers, it may mean not getting three invoices for three different products from the same company.

During the meteoric rise of e-business, e-business hype grew right along with dot-com market valuations -- until the bubble burst in the spring of 2000. Since that time, the hype has dropped from the absolutely ridiculous ("e-business is changing the laws of economics") to the merely unrealistic ("e-business will change the world as we know it").