Business performance management has generated considerable interest among organizations worldwide. Is it just the latest IT buzzword destined to die out in a few months, or is it here to stay? In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Curt Hall presents the results of a recent study on the acceptance and benefits of BPM, predicting that the adoption of BPM practices will enjoy steady but moderate growth through the end of this year.

Now picture this: your CEO, COO, CFO, and CIO meet to discuss levels of IT spending and next year's IT budget. So what do they talk about when they talk about IT spending? Certainly, they talk about planned levels of IT spending and whether the projected trend is up or down and by how much. But also important, they talk about the distribution of the company's IT dollars and the allocation of IT resources. Each executive brings to the table his or her view of the role of IT within the company, and these views shape the discussion.

Software modeling is getting more fashionable, but it has a long way to go before it becomes as respectable as writing code. Which is funny in a way, because code is just one particular kind of model! Too many people get hung up on the graphical nature of modeling techniques such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML), forgetting that they have underlying textual representations as well.