I've remarked before that one of the great things about the popularity of the Internet and the Web (really beginning around 1997) is that it forced many IT people to take a larger view of their jobs.

In a time when companies have to justify return on investment of their Web sites and supply concrete evidence about how Internet services improve their bottom lines, it is vital to collect, analyze, and refine the right data on which to base decisions.

In the US, agriculture employed 63% of the workforce in 1840 compared with just 2% today. In 1943, the number of US blue-collar employees reached its peak, accounting for at least 40% of the workforce. That number has steadily declined since then to about 8%, and before the end of the century may well fall to the same level as that of agriculture [3].

[Excerpted from an article in the June 2004 Business-IT Strategies Executive Report.]

"The level of risk management required to cope with emerging issues has increased significantly both for the CIO and the corporation as a whole. As a result, the need for enterprise risk management and governance has never been greater or more urgent," says Cutter Consortium Fellow Robert N. Charette.

Let's start this note with a pop quiz: what's the difference between Dennis Kozlowski's toga-infested $2.1-million birthday party, with Tyco paying for half of it, and a failed SAP installation that costs a company $20 million? Answer: One of them is an ill-advised colossal waste of company resources and the other is a birthday party.

As someone who started writing about business rules in 1984 when I began to cover the expert systems market, I find the current surge of interest in business rules unsurprising. I only wonder why it took so long.

There are always more things to get done in a business than there are hours in a day. Weeding through the spam to deal with the real e-mail, answer the phones, handle the daily backup and the monthly finances and the billing and receivables and status reports -- and somewhere in there is the task of getting your product out the door.

Back in December 2003, I wrote an article discussing how Intel Corporation and SAS Institute had teamed up in order to advance the application of mobile BI technology (see the 2 December 2003 Business Intelligence Advisor, " SAS, Intel, and Mobile Business Intelligence").

In the process of reviewing the Oracle bid to buy PeopleSoft, it's come out that in late 2003, Microsoft and SAP spent several weeks discussing the possibility of a merger. And last week it was announced that Sun and Fujitsu would be entering into a partnership. All of these moves hint at future consolidation in the computer industry.

If you haven't read the 21 June 2004 issue of BusinessWeek, I recommend you grab a copy. It's the BusinessWeek annual issue on the top 100 InfoTech companies in the world, and the article I recommend is the lead for the InfoTech section entitled "Big Bang," by Stephen Baker and Heather Green.

This Advisor continues the discussion begun in Part 1 (see " Harvesting Inventions -- Approaches for Identifying and Selecting Inventions to Paten t," 2 June 2004).

This week I offer some sample approaches to implementing a patent funnel.