Editor's note: A recent posting on the Cutter Forum by Borys Stokalski contains some interesting predictions we thought would be of interest to Cutter IT Journal subscribers.

Editor's note: A recent posting on the Cutter Forum (http://pub10.ezboard.com/bcutter.html) by Borys Stokalski cont

Editor's note: A recent posting on the Cutter Forum (http://pub10.ezboard.com/bcutter.html) by Borys Stokalski cont

As the new economy continues to redefine businesses, no IT organization will remain untouched. Converging with trends such as increasing globalization, productivity growth, and speed in business execution, the information-based economy places new demands on IT groups, and it renders obsolete the IT organizational model still prevalent in many established businesses.

The demands of the new economy present new requirements for the IT organization. It is no longer sufficient to focus only on keeping the networks running and reacting to business requests with new applications. Businesses now require that the IT organization meet the additional requirements for:

"Companies that don't have an e-business strategy will be out of business in two years." "E-business is changing everything." "If you don't 'get' e-business, e-business will get you." Ad libitum. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam.

Paul Harmon, Editor

The job of developing systems and IT solutions in the post-Y2000 era is a daunting proposition. Today, IT organizations manage a large portfolio of older legacy systems (patched up to survive the millennium rollover). Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions have been added on top of that to provide packaged solutions and retire some of the older legacy systems. Now comes the push to Web-enable the organization, create marketable components, and build new products.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) describes a new category of software products that allows the unification and reuse of existing IT assets, facilitating their integration into a cohesive corporate system framework. This Executive Report predicts that most IT organizations will create an EAI agenda in the near future.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) describes a new category of software products that allows the unification and reuse of existing IT assets, facilitating their integration into a cohesive corporate system framework. This Executive Report predicts that most IT organizations will create an EAI agenda in the near future.

In this Executive Update, I review some recent Cutter Consortium data on the commitment (or lack thereof) that IT organizations have made to component reuse and how they are implementing these commitments. This data is derived from the responses of 50 large organizations that Cutter surveyed during the past six months.

All of the traditional practices of project management, including estimating, scheduling, monitoring, risk analysis, contingency planning, change management, problem solving, and team building, apply to object technology and component-based development projects.

All of the traditional practices of project management, including estimating, scheduling, monitoring, risk analysis, contingency planning, change management, problem solving, and team building, apply to object technology and component-based development projects.

In Part I of this article (see BIA, April 2000), I discussed the major trends influencing the data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) industry.

This is the concluding piece of my two-part report on the state of data warehousing and business intelligence in which I examine the major trends shaping the industry and influencing the application of the technology.

Previously available only to its development partners, Microsoft has just announced general availability of the beta 2 release of its SQL Server 2000 database. SQL Server 2000 includes a slew of new features and functionality targeted at Internet commerce and business intelligence (BI). Key highlights in SQL Server 2000 include: