Seemingly interminable meetings are often struggling in the "groan zone," Sam Kaner's wonderful term for the time period in which meeting participants are trying to understand each other.

IT has traditionally had three broad categories of functions: setting technical strategy directions for the company, building and supporting business applications, and assembling and supporting the company's technical infrastructure. Although each of these functions remains relevant and necessary, the concept that they are best performed by an internal IT organization is becoming demonstrably obsolete.

As I talk with people at companies that are working on large-scale e-business integration efforts, I'm told, over and over again, that integration is the key. If a company can't get its large, diverse legacy applications to talk to one another in an efficient manner, it can't hope to provide the kind of customer support that Web users want.

The other day, I broke a 12" x 12" x 1" pine board with my bare hand after listening to a 90-minute motivational talk about breaking barriers to achieve goals. As someone with martial arts training, I was less impressed with my own success than I was with the success of a 12-year-old in the group of parents and children.

At a recent IT conference, a colleague of mine who helps companies negotiate large-scale outsourcing deals posed a question to the audience. He mused, "Have we squeezed all the productivity there is to squeeze out of IT?"

At a recent IT conference, a colleague of mine who helps companies negotiate large-scale outsourcing deals posed a question to the audience. He mused, "Have we squeezed all the productivity there is to squeeze out of IT?"

I am not a confident cook. My approach at big dinners is to write down everything I want to make, assemble all the ingredients, orchestrate an appropriate set of dependencies (what needs to come out of the oven first, and so on) and then implement with the goal that everything be hot and on the table, hopefully edible, at the same time.