As we all know, achieving IT and business alignment is not easy. We must tie business strategy, technology, and people into a comprehensive and synergistic package that, as Paul Strassmann says, will demonstrate a positive relationship between IT and accepted financial measures of performance. However, as my mother used to say, you need to be careful for what you wish for, because you might get it.

We all know how important clear and effective communication is for the work we do -- whether it is identifying and resolving day-to-day problems or working on a large project. A personal experience I had recently emphasized for me, again, how what we "hear" is not always what is being "said," or what is "meant."

September 11, 2001, was without a doubt the biggest failure of American intelligence ever. Months later, people continue to shake their heads at the terrorists' seeming ability to achieve total tactical surprise. Simply put, the question on everyone's lips remains: "Where were our intelligence agencies?"

Whether a software organization succeeds or fails at changing its culture depends largely on leadership and the successful institutionalization of desired practices. Cultures capable of sustaining change and high performance respect, value, and support their people throughout the change.

As the aftershocks of the September 11 events continue to reverberate, many companies are hunkering down, tightening their belts, and cutting the budgets of projects that will not directly contribute to fourth-quarter profits.

On 14 November, IBM announced its support for the Object Management Group's (OMG) new Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and indicated that it would be including MDA in an upcoming release of WebSphere. This is a major boost for the OMG's MDA approach.

This seems to be the year for disasters. In the last three months, in addition to the September 11 disaster, I've seem three very large IT projects cancelled after the expenditure of considerable sums of money. One was in excess of US $50 million -- an ambitious Web project whose managers did not think it necessary to include performance modeling in the design.

In last week's Advisor, I discussed the growing importance of business process improvement in the age of e-business. Every company that seeks to take advantage of the Internet and Web to improve the way it does business must necessarily start by reviewing existing processes to see how they can be changed to take advantage of new activities that the Internet and Web can make possible.