Last summer, I had an experience that continues to make me think. I was at an IFPUG conference (the International Function Points User's Group is an organization committed to refining techniques for software measurement), and I was talking with a manager who had been successful in manufacturing for a large multinational company and now had duties in IT. Because he was new to IT, he felt tentative about his new responsibilities and was looking for ideas.

Many IT managers are juggling too many projects and not enough staff. How do you make sure everyone's focused on the right project?

The newly released results of Howard Rubin's 1998 data collection for the 1999 Worldwide Benchmark Report show some interesting trends in (among other things) IT spending an

The newly released results of Howard Rubin's 1998 data collection for the 1999 Worldwide Benchmark Report show some interesting trends in (among other things) IT spending and priorities.

The newly released results of Howard Rubin's 1998 data collection for the 1999 Worldwide Benchmark Report show some interesting trends in (among other things) IT spending and priorities.

Lou Russell is president of Russell Martin & Associates, a learning facilitation and consulting firm, and author of Teach Less to Learn More, to be published by Jossey-Bass in 1999.

The information presented in this section is the first of a multipart series summarizing the results of 1998 data collection that will appear in the 1999 Worldwide Benchmark

With all investments in information technology (IT), the object is to make the "right" investments and avoid the ones that will not sustain a viable strategy.

Not too long ago, you could relegate your infrastructure design, development, and support to a back-office team that knew how to support the mainframe-based applications residing comfortably in your corporate data center. When you bought computers, it was with confidence -- and probably from the same vendor who sold you the last five machines.

In this Executive Update, Senior Consultant Chris Pickering, one of the Cutter Consortium's experts on the effective use of information technology, discusses the latest trends in the "culture war" between business and IT and dispels the myth of central planning.

Q. What kind of cultural issues are you seeing lately?

This report provides an overview of how several major vendors are conceptualizing distributed architectures. In some cases, the vendor is only offering suggestions about how a client company might architect its application and middleware resources. In other cases, vendors offer specific products to fill all of the obvious layers in the architectural model the vendor is suggesting.