My wife and I have a technique we use to ensure that we stay focused on completing our household to-do list. We throw a party.

One of the wise decisions the Object Management Group (OMG) made when it standardized on UML in the late 1990s was to focus only on notation and to ignore specific methodological issues. That kept UML independent of any specific methodology, and it provided time for methodologies to evolve.

Often IT managers are unwilling or unable to use one of their most powerful management tools -- asking for help.

You can tell a lot about a company by the discipline it practices [1]. Some companies perform due diligence, while others make decisions based on what the brother-in-law thinks. There are also consultants who will tell you how to think -- for a price, of course.

Over the years, many large companies have used the Object Management Group's (OMG) CORBA middleware to link large enterprise applications. The leading vendor of CORBA -- IONA -- for example, claims it has more than 4,500 customers that rely on CORBA solutions. In many cases these are the same applications that companies are now considering integrating via the Internet to create Web services.

I am always surprised at how many similarities there are between the IT industry and other, more established industries -- as well as the similarities between departments. One similarity has to do with how we, project managers, may plan and track our projects versus how a marketing department may plan and track its sales.

There's been a lot of talk at data warehousing conferences and in the press (and by the extraction, transformation, and loading [ETL] tool vendors) about the need to update and refresh data warehouses in real time. In practice, however, few organizations are currently conducting real-time (or near real-time) data warehouse updates and refreshments.

Editor's Note: Cutter Consortium asked Helen Pukstza to revisit this Advisor, originally published in 2000. Here she provides guidance for companies surviving the current economic climate.

This week I want to talk about a problem I'm interested in and invite you to suggest options or products I haven't considered.

It is generally accepted that when management burnout occurs within an IT organization, there is a problem. If a manager is experiencing burnout, how can he or she make effective decisions and provide reliable information to upper management? While it is important to recognize when one of your managers is cracking under the pressure, how you approach the problem goes a long way toward determining whether you're addressing the symptoms of burnout or solving the underlying problem.

This week's announcement by retailer Best Buy that it is changing its privacy policy highlights just how meaningless customer data privacy policies actually are for consumers. Moreover, for our interests, it also makes one wonder just how much emphasis (or effort) companies should place on defining their privacy policies if they can change them to suit their needs any time they want.