In my latest industry survey, "Survey of e-Business and IT Practices" (available now from Cutter Consortium), one question asks: What are the top limitations to getting more from IT in your company? Respondents' top three answers were funding, lack of business strategy, and, tied for third place, available IT staff and available business staff. IT staffing, in one form or another, is a perennial issue, but IT staffing's high ranking in these latest results shows that it is particularly pressing at this time.

I'm as cynical as most and the first to admit that a column entitled "Trust" is likely to offer platitudes. Like honesty and ethics, we all claim to believe in them. It's simply a matter of applying such a nice-sounding concept in everyday situations.

At the last Cutter Consortium Summit (April 2001, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; http://www.cutter.com/summit/), Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants Lou Russell and Tim Lister did an outstanding presentation on IT organizational transformation. During the panel discussion, I said that changing a culture takes about 9-18 months.

The term "personalization" is being thrown around so much by vendors and marketing folks that it's now used to describe almost any sort of customer interaction tool or application. As a result, there is some confusion as to what "personalization" actually entails.

I've just returned from a whirlwind business trip to India, my first since January of this year. In January, the US recession and associated slowdown in IT spending were recognized as significant events, but the common opinion was that Indian vendors would be relatively unaffected.

One of the core practices of agile modeling (AM) is active stakeholder participation.

I continue to see references to companies developing enterprise knowledge portals, business intelligence (BI) portals, customer relationship management portals, and even balanced scorecard portals.

I usually stay away from books with cutesy names, but I finally picked this one up because it showed up on many best-seller lists. First, Break All the Rules , by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (Simon & Schuster, 1999, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/

"But, Monsieur Jeff," Francois implored. "Surely French wine will not present a problem for you."

I've been involved with a company attempting to straighten out a decision support system it developed to streamline its software sales, marketing, and customer support operations.

Software development is increasingly object-oriented (OO). Java is an OO language. The latest version of Visual Basic and Microsoft's new C# are also OO languages. And components and various component techniques rely on object techniques. Thus, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) application servers are also OO programming environments. The popular press may prefer to dismiss objects and focus on components, but serious software developers know that object technologies, in one guise or another, now dominate software development and architectural designs.

The goal of gathering data to establish a baseline of IT activities should be to answer some clear-cut questions. These questions should then provide a roadmap for future updates to the baseline. The questions might include:

I continue to come across articles and marketing material pushing the idea that maybe companies don't really need to build and maintain data warehouses anymore due to data brokering products such as those from Enterworks or Metagon.