Although commonly accepted by many organizations as just an additional route to market, e-business builds heavily on an enterprise's technical infrastructure, directly affects PR and marketing strategies, and is subject to a number of cultural, legislative, and environmental constraints.

If you read the popular business magazines, you'll find a lot of discussion about the "new economy" and whether corporate investments in IT over the course of the last five years have really led to significantly higher levels of productivity.

Many miles away Something crawls to the surface Of a dark Scottish lake -- The Police, "Synchronicity II"

When we examine the assumptions underlying approaches to project management or nearly any other business process, it is clear that quite a number of people confuse formality and discipline.

I'm hearing everywhere about how IT spending is shrinking. Major IT software and hardware vendors are cutting back, citing a slowing in spending. Oracle, Intel, and even everyone's favorite, Cisco, have announced cutbacks. What's going on? Is this the end of an era?

I have read a lot of articles on component reuse lately. Some have argued that component reuse is more problematic than others have claimed. Others are very optimistic. I'm somewhere in between. I've been writing about components for years, and have talked about the possibilities, advantages, and disadvantages of component reuse for almost a decade.

When a head of state unexpectedly dies -- in a monarchy or republic -- the citizenry is understandably shocked. They are not shocked, however, when a successor is immediately named. After all, most governments have a clear succession plan based on law, tradition, or both. If the president or CEO of a major corporation meets an untimely death, retires, or simply moves on, there is often a succession plan already in place.

One of the most interesting sessions at this year's Cutter Summit conference was the one on XP. If you haven't been keeping up with your buzzwords lately, XP is the abbreviation for extreme programming; one of the leading spokesmen on the topic, Kent Beck, gave the keynote address, and a spirited debate took place during the panel session that followed.

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of debate and discussion amongst Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants about the merits of various IT tools, technologies, and techniques. Light versus heavy methods, pair programming versus traditional individual programming, agile versus strict modeling, philosophers versus practitioners, and so on.

I'm sure most of you reacted as I did when you heard that two Microsoft vice presidents had launched an attack on open source software: What else is new? In effect, Microsoft has been doing this for a long time, and it's hardly news. Other companies like IBM and Sun, which have promoted proprietary software in the past, have come around and figured out how to live with open source software.

We hear a lot about hackers getting into corporate computers and the impact of viruses on worker productivity. What we don't hear about is the impact of poor security policies on worker productivity. I consult a lot with organizations around the world, and I am seeing an interesting trend with corporate security: as corporate managers become more afraid, enterprise security becomes more intrusive.

With the dot-com shakeout and the general malaise infecting the economy, you'd almost think that business intelligence (BI) analytics for business-to-consumer (B2C) personalization had become a dirty term. Last year at this time, vendors were tripping over themselves to enter the B2C analytics and "personalization" market.