In today's environment of doing more with less, organizations are finding themselves with staff members that are burning out fast and are unable to deal with the growing work load.

Alert Webster, there's a new word in the English language: Amazoned. The definition: It's what happens to a business that doesn't keep up with the Internet economy.

With the collapse of the dot-com industry, we don't hear much talk these days about the Internet revolutionizing mankind; Nicholas Negroponte's 1995 paean, Being Digital, probably wouldn't sell very well today. Indeed, with the collapse of the high-tech stock market, it's hard to find anyone saying positive things about the benefits of technology.

With the collapse of the dot-com industry, we don't hear much talk these days about the Internet revolutionizing mankind; Nicholas Negroponte's 1995 paean, Being Digital, probably wouldn't sell very well today. Indeed, with the collapse of the high-tech stock market, it's hard to find anyone saying positive things about the benefits of technology.

In a previous Advisor ( 12 July 2000), I discussed how to conduct an identification session that surfaces key impediments to an organizational or divisional objective. Armed with that information, you are ready to begin the second phase of the facilitation.

Time passes quickly. It's hard to imagine that I've been writing Architecture Advisors for three years now. In that time, of course, the world of software development has evolved rapidly, and, as I considered what to write this month, I thought that it might be good to step back and think, very broadly, about the status of software architectures today.

Each year, members of our community present new methods of building and maintaining software. It is our task to be open-minded, learn, and think. We must always look at our people and the product we are building before we decide which process or method to use.