Much has been made about the need for companies to obtain a complete, "360-degree" view of their customer data (i.e., to be able to access, integrate, and analyze pertinent data across their most important customer channels) in order to apply customer relationship management (CRM) across the organization.

SMART is an acronym that stands for:

Most companies are exploring enterprise Web service possibilities. In essence, they are considering building large-scale business processes that cross organizational boundaries. A good example would be a supply chain process that treated supplier, manufacturer, carrier, distributor, and retailer processes as subprocesses within the larger supply chain system.

[Editor's Note: This Cutter IT E-Mail Advisor is a follow up to the Advisor published 19 June 2002, " Business Continuity Planning."]

In an earlier Advisor (" Know When to Say When: The Difficulty in Discontinuing Failing and Failed IT Projects," 10 July 2002), I had briefly discussed the potential problems with capitalizing IT expenses. In light of recent happenings at WorldCom, what was a potential problem has become a reality.

This past week, The Economist (20-26 July 2002) published a special survey on the US defense industry. The wide-ranging article touches on many topics, but I like the general comments it makes on strategy.

A favorite quote of mine is, "Reputation is who you are in the light ... character is who you are in the dark." I don't know who said it, but it never fails to motivate me to try and do the best that I can, especially if no one is watching. I've been thinking about this quote a lot lately, especially in relation to the quality of code that developers write.