IBM announced it's buying Alphablox Corporation for an undisclosed amount. Alphablox's namesake product is a component-based Java application development environment (ADE) that is particularly useful for developing and embedding analytic functionality within other software applications.

[Excerpted from an article in the September 1992 Cutter IT Journal (formerly American Programmer).]

Few software risk management approaches attempt to handle both software-intensive systems-related process and product risks, and almost none assesses the primary reasons for utilizing software-intensive systems in the first place, as this is perceived to be "outside the scope" of software project managers.

Last week I had a one-on-one meeting with the CIO of one of my clients, a major financial services firm. During our conversation, Ron asked for advice about transforming his organization. By this time, I'd been working with Ron's team for about six months, and the team had made remarkable progress.

I remember when "platform" meant hardware, and later "hardware and an operating system." Today, the term is used in a variety of ways, but it always seems to suggest the platform on which key applications will sit or the environment the applications will depend on as they are executed.

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.