Customer relationship management (CRM) has emerged as the next major wave in the movement of firms toward the goal of tying together their value chain through the use of enterprise-level information technology.

I was visiting a client recently and was asked: "What do you think the future of Web services is? How quickly do you think it will happen?" I gave my standard response to these questions: I don't know.

E-mail is an integral part of the communication structure within organizations and is frequently the basis of collaborative communication between researchers and developers on projects undertaken at multiple locations. Did you know that the average employee spends four working weeks a year on e-mail communication?

Now that the new year is under way, I thought it would be a good idea to look ahead to what we can expect to see in 2002 in the way of data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), and customer relationship management (CRM) trends.

This is the first DEA E-Mail Advisor of the new year. In the last Advisor, I tried to summarize the major events for 2001. In this issue, I want to take a crack at predicting the major events for 2002. Obviously, given the scope of this Advisor, I'm not going to try to predict political, economic, or business trends, in general, but will stick with a narrow range of technological and IT developments.

One aspect of business-IT alignment that often gets overlooked in the rush of day-to-day IT activities is IT's attitude about business needs. An attitude that puts business first -- a business focus -- is an important tool to promote improved business-IT alignment.

Twelve to eighteen months ago the job market was so tight that many employers were happy to hire candidates who barely met the minimum requirements of the job. At times, the minimum requirements were tossed just to get a warm body working! Unfortunately, certain key processes were also tossed, including reference checks.

One of the most interesting IT developments in 2001 was the growing use of patterns. At least a dozen books on patterns came out during the year, documenting patterns for new languages, for component models, for analysis and design issues, and for middleware systems development. One of the areas that I followed most closely was the extension of patterns to large-scale application design.