A colleague of mine tells a funny story about interviewing for a job with Sun Microsystems when she was nearing completion of her MBA at Stanford University, California, USA. It was the mid-1980s. Sun was an exciting young company operating in the shadow of larger rivals such as Apollo and Computervision (remember them?).

I've been playing around with an idea for several months in conjunction with a new book I am working on. In effect, I thought about extending the popular "patterns" approach to provide a way to help business managers think about the kinds of changes they could make in their organizations. A lot of companies are thinking about transitioning to e-business models.

How can we facilitate cross-media e-business and utilize next-generation e-services to empower virtual channels that target wireless initiatives? The challenge of engineering global solutions is to innovate end-to-end metrics that target mission-critical applications to develop the organization's killer portals.

How can we facilitate cross-media e-business and utilize next-generation e-services to empower virtual channels that target wireless initiatives? The challenge of engineering global solutions is to innovate end-to-end metrics that target mission-critical applications to develop the organization's killer portals.

My experience building and deploying e-business applications over the past two years has been quite frustrating. Proof of concept evolves rapidly into a pilot project, and before you know it, you are supporting a prototype application in production mode, interacting with back-end transactional systems.

In Business Week this week, I read of a gentleman who traded stock with E*Trade. On the side, he sold an older computer via Yahoo! Classifieds. The sale went quickly and he got a bank- certified check for his computer. Unfortunately, the check was a phony, written by a cybercrook that the FBI was after. The gentleman didn't know any of this and deposited the certified check into his E*Trade account.

It has long been a given that accurately estimating project effort is virtually impossible without data from other, similar projects. Unfortunately, in the world of Internet time, not many teams have accurate metrics from past projects; moreover, the likelihood that any new project is truly similar to past projects is slim.

It has long been a given that accurately estimating project effort is virtually impossible without data from other, similar projects. Unfortunately, in the world of Internet time, not many teams have accurate metrics from past projects; moreover, the likelihood that any new project is truly similar to past projects is slim.

It has occurred to me that I don't think big enough. For example, I've been thinking that a $100-million enterprise resource planning (ERP) installation is a big deal. But now I'm not so sure; it may be that there are software applications out there that could turn out to be worth billions, maybe trillions, by the time it's all said and done.