A number of organizations with high software capability are finding it possible to increase their capability even further by successfully exploiting the concept of software product lines. A software product line is a group of software products that, in relation to their given market or mission and their implementation, have a set of common features and well-understood variations.

In our personal lives, we all tend to gravitate toward roles and responsibilities that make use of our strongest skills. The family member with the best cooking ability usually prepares the meals. The person with a head for finances balances the checkbook and pays the bills. Every individual is naturally adept in some area, and these skills form our core competencies.

All people gravitate toward their strengths. The best cook makes the meals for the family. The mechanically inclined person fixes the squeaky door. The plant lover tends the garden.

As described in Cutter Consortium's Business-IT Strategies Executive Report, " The New Risk Management" (Vol. III, No. 9), today's business environment contains more diverse kinds of risks and rewards than ever before, ones that few organizations have much, if any, experience in managing.

As described in Cutter Consortium's Business-IT Strategies Executive Report, " The New Risk Management" (Vol. III, No. 9), today's business environment contains more diverse kinds of risks and rewards than ever before, ones that few organizations have much, if any, experience in managing.

Cutter Consortium's online business-IT strategies survey asks respondents to identify the leading obstacles to getting more from information technology in their companies. Figure 1 summarizes the results, which are surprising in some areas. See how the results compare to your situation, and consider how these obstacles can be overcome.

The term "server" has become a seriously overused word. There are hardware platforms called servers and there are operating systems called servers (e.g., Windows 2000 Server). At the same time that Microsoft has called one of its 2000 systems a server, it has included a variety of utilities inside Windows that it also calls servers (e.g., Microsoft Transaction Server [MTS], Microsoft Message Server).

Paul Harmon, Editor

You can't spell business without "e." And business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce is hot right now. Analysts predict that B2B sales over the Internet will reach US $500 billion by early next year and be up to $2 trillion by 2004 (it is possible that they may even reach $10 trillion).

Analysts predict that business-to-business (B2B) sales over the Internet will reach US $500 billion by early next year and $2 trillion or more by 2004. In contrast, business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce sales are not expected to reach $400 billion until 2003. Business analysts believe that B2B will cut costs, reinvent supply chains, improve communications, and increase customer satisfaction.

In this Executive Update, we'll take a look at the latest data from Cutter Consortium's ongoing survey on components/distributed computing and their relationship to component-based application servers. (We used the term component-based application servers on the survey to distinguish it from other application server uses, ranging from hardware servers to HTTP or Web servers.)

The norm for software development today is to use object-oriented (OO) and component-based technologies -- such as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Java, and Microsoft's C# -- in combination with relational database technology such as DB2 or Oracle 8i.

Two common metrics for software size are source lines of code and function points. But by no means are these the only units of size; others include objects, modules, programs, components, and frames. Obviously there are scaling relationships between these abstractions. How can you translate one from the other to understand the proportional aspects of one metric to the next? If you knew the size of a major application in source lines of code, is there a way to equate the size using a metric like function points for people who speak that language?

Functional size measurement is a fairly recent concept to be embraced by the IT industry. But, increasingly, the method of function point (FP) analysis, as maintained by the International Function Point Users Group (IFPUG), is establishing a position within the field of software measurement.

Understanding the inventory of IT applications is considered to be of high strategic value for organizations interested in IT benchmarking. For some, the purpose might be to better estimate future projects. Others might be embarking on a process improvement strategy and want to know how various IT groups perform relative to one another. A third group could include IT organizations involved in outsourcing or partnering, and they might need this information to quantify the respective roles and productivity commitments.

Measuring the Software Process by William Florac and Anita Carleton (Addison-Wesley, 1999) is a self-contained statistical process control (SPC) foundation in the context of software process improvement (SPI).