"There are three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can't." -- Anonymous

We hear almost daily about the imperative need to align our IT infrastructure and systems with the business activity. IT must not only support our business processes within a fast-changing environment, but also be responsive to new demands for managerial information.

Business performance depends on the appropriateness of the business model adopted by organizations and on how effectively their IT infrastructure supports this model. Every day, companies are faced with the imperative need to align IT to their fast-changing business needs. The rapid technological developments in the IT arena also bring into question current business models.

Technical homogeneity produces a compelling pull on IT. Perhaps it harkens back to our mainframe roots -- the big mainframe, green-screen terminals, and COBOL programs were the essence of homogeneity. When viewed through contemporary glasses, that time seems to epitomize simplicity. There were no questions about which platform to use: COBOL was a given. The crux of the matter was to write programs.

In working with software organizations around the world, perhaps the most common complaint I hear is, "Our software projects take too long!" What they want to know is, "How can we reduce the elapsed time of software development?"; upon further questioning, it quickly becomes clear that what they really want is to reduce the elapsed time of software development projects without:

Paul Harmon, Editor

Complexity is all around us.

Complexity is all around us.

The economic case for business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce is overwhelming in its potential benefits. But as with every disruptive technology, there will be winners and losers. The early adopters are more likely to be the winners, particularly in those businesses subject to the "winner takes all" effect.

I probably read a half-dozen articles a week with the word middleware in the title or the first paragraph. Everyone who is interested in the technologies underlying the Internet, e-business, and distributed computing is interested in middleware. Middleware is made up of all the various software products and technologies that are used to link objects or modules on clients with objects or modules on servers.

As we continue to tackle the challenge of managing IT projects with a known deadline and (usually) unknown requirements, the trick is to take what we've learned about documenting our own trends and put it to good use as we face new projects.

Text-analysis products have been around for years. For the most part, however, these early products were clumsy; they were difficult to deploy and use.

An Internet startup called digiMine.com plans to offer data mining and other business intelligence (BI) applications and services targeted at dot-coms and business-to-business e-commerce companies.

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It is said that the dawn of the personal computer represented the first major computing revolution, and the appearance of the Web marked the second. Now we're standing on the brink of the third great computing revolution -- the advent of the "Internet appliance" (IA).