When a company or department becomes single-mindedly obsessed with time to market, it sometimes acts in risky, self-destructive ways that result in the thing it fears most: blowing the delivery date even more than originally anticipated.

What happens when two organizations go bump in the night? Well, if they are boats, they spring leaks, take on water, miss arrival times, and sometimes sink. If they are a client organization needing software and a software organization providing software, they run into trouble, too. The sad experience in 1995 of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and a software contractor reveals what happens when ignorance -- actually, partial knowledge -- bumps into partial knowledge.

The primary reason software organizations are implementing critical chain project management is that it allows them to substantially reduce the elapsed time of their projects without:

Software organizations are implementing software critical chain project management to substantially reduce the elapsed time of their projects without adding resources (or increasing overtime), narrowing the project scope, increasing risk, or cutting quality of the delivered system. As a by-product, late projects are virtually eliminated.

In Cutter Consortium's ongoing business-IT strategies survey, 68% of respondents have formal business strategies, and 61% have formal IT strategies. We might expect these numbers to be closer to 100%, but many companies do not focus their energies on developing strategies. But what about the other end of the planning-doing spectrum -- IT projects? How do companies execute these?

Paul Harmon, Editor

This report outlines various architectural options for an XML infrastructure, with an emphasis on application development in the middle tier of Web sites. It provides information about using XML data servers to store and access XML data. After reading this report, you will be able to make decisions about the type of XML data server that is best suited for your application needs.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an exciting development for the Internet. It is already seeing significant use as a means for exchanging data for business-to-business applications. As these XML applications continue to expand, it becomes important to determine how XML data will be stored and retrieved since these functions are necessary to support e-commerce.

In this Executive Update, we will explore two issues based on the latest survey results from Cutter Consortium: first, the percentage of surveyed companies that are using components; second, the types of component models they're using. The survey data is drawn from major companies in North America and Europe.

Until recently, the purchasing function and supply chain systems were considered corporate backwaters. How things have changed: a feature section on supply chain management strategies made it to the cover of the October issue of CIO magazine. The main thrust of the article is that we have done a wonderful job integrating the enterprise, and now it's time to do the same across the supply chain.

IT applications outsourcing of this sort is becoming increasingly popular as demand for new functionality continues to outpace IT capacity, and companies rush to expand into new markets.

Process productivity limitations, combined with IT staff shortages, are forcing companies to increasingly hire outsiders to build applications for them. The problem is, how do you know if a contractor can deliver what it promises during the courtship (aka proposal) phase?

In Parts I and II of this article ( August and September 2000 BIA), I

Data mining and statistical analysis tools vendor SPSS, Inc. has released nViZn, a software development kit (SDK) for building browser-based visual analysis applications in Java. nViZn combines excellent visual data analysis, tightly integrated with SPSS analytics.

1010data +1 212 430 6560

Sagent Technology has just announced its new enterprise information portal (EIP) -- Sagent Portal. In a nutshell, Sagent Portal combines the company's data mart/analytical platform and Centrus data integration/data enhancement products, with the Sequoia XML Portal Server, which Sagent has licensed from Sequoia Software.

Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss the Sagent Portal with the Sagent folks. Here's an overview of Sagent Portal and why I think it's important.

The emerging electronic economy has created an entirely new focus on the critical importance of managing customer relationships. Competition for customers is increasing in every major industry. New technologies are rapidly changing the realm of what is possible in customer contact, care, and insight. Customer expectations for quality, service, and value are constantly on the rise.

© 2000 by Frederick C. Van Bennekom and Mikael Blaisdell. All rights reserved.

© 2000 by Frederick C. Van Bennekom and Mikael Blaisdell. All rights reserved.