"Collaboration without process is chaos, and process without automation is unrealistic," says Sky Basu, founder and CEO of speeDEV (http://www.speedev.com), a small (the company was formed in 1994, but released the first product, speeDEV, in 2000) company that has entered the collaborative software tool market.

As the availability of large amounts of information increases, companies' abilities to exploit that information for business purposes becomes proportional to the level of quality of the data. When bad data items are injected into a system, there are significant impacts, all of which cut into profitability.

This is my last Advisor during the summer vacation season here in California. Next week, most of my readers will be back in the office, thinking about enterprise architecture issues and other weighty business topics. Before summer is over entirely, however, I thought you might like to know about my birthday gift to myself: a Kyocera.

One step you might consider adding to your development process is brief project reviews. I like to imagine it takes skill and experience to recognize some of the more subtle problems early, but the fundamentals of a review are actually pretty straightforward. What follows is a quick checklist of questions you can use to assess the general health of your project and identify areas that might need some attention.

Say goodbye to those extension cords.

A sample product vision statement:

I had lunch not too long ago with a mid-level manager at a defense contractor. He was interested in how my e-commerce research might apply to his organizational issues.

Recently, I worked with a team lead to assist him in pulling together a project plan for completing some system enhancements. The project team that was to be involved had complained that previous releases had unrealistic schedules and commitments, required too much overtime, and lacked a clear work plan. This time, we were hoping to tackle some of these issues by conducting some additional up-front planning.

Whether implicitly or explicitly, portfolio management has always been a key function of IT management. Selecting which projects to undertake, allocating resource levels to projects, and monitoring results across projects are key portfolio management activities.

Anyone involved in developing component-based software is probably aware that a growing number of people are advocating "new" software methodologies. In the US, these new methodologies are typically called Extreme Programming (XP -- http://www.extremeprogramming.org).

There are two main requirements for the success of IT projects, particularly the critical, fast-moving projects associated with e-business: alignment with business needs and rapid, low-cost delivery. Both can be achieved through effective project management practices. On these e-projects, alignment means achieving effective and rapid-response requirements management.

Oracle recently ran into trouble with some of its packaged application customers when it announced it was planning to discontinue support for version 10.7 of Oracle Applications.

According to Cutter Consortium, the biggest problem facing project managers today is a lack of direction.