I've been involved in a dozen discussions in the past two months on the nature of e-business. In some cases, I've talked with non-IS people, and the discussion often revolves around the failure of the dot.coms and what that means about the future of e-business. The other conversations have been with IS folks and those conversations are, in many ways, more interesting to me.

"It only happens with pistachio ice cream," the exasperated man explained. "The car starts fine when I buy vanilla or chocolate ice cream, but it never starts when I buy pistachio."

The analysis of the desirability of outsourcing usually follows an approach similar to the phased approach for developing information systems.

One of the interesting presentations at the Object Management Group's (OMG) E-Business Application Integration (EAI) workshop in Orlando, Florida, USA, in January was given by Colonel Lawrence Sweeney, US Air Force. Sweeney is the joint program manager of the Department of Defense's (DOD) Space and Naval Warfare Information Technology Center (SPAWAR ITC) project.

Late last year, I wrote an article about ensuring appropriate business cases exist for projects (" Benefits: Not As Intangible As You Think!", Cutter IT E-Mail Advisor, 22 November 2000).

When two of IBM's biggest competitors, Amdahl and Hitachi, announced they were withdrawing from the mainframe market, Cutter Consortium decided to look into the current demand of mainframes.

A variant of a quote from Dwight Eisenhower goes something like: the value of the plan is not in the plan itself, but in the planning. As we think about putting together good sourcing activities -- whether acquiring a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) package, outsourcing some development work, or outsourcing a whole IT organization -- planning is critical.

With all of the gloomy stories about the dot-com collapse, you might get the impression that the high-tech jobs associated with all of those failed companies have vanished. If pets.com and this.com and that.com have all gone bankrupt, then will we really need all of those Java programmers? If the dot-com industry has laid off 20,000-30,000 people in the past year, are they all still unemployed?

Well, not a startup exactly.

I have recently been closely involved with an organization that is incubating a new Web-based service business within a much larger company. An "internal startup," if you like.

If business projects are part of your profession, you know that many projects fail to live up to their potential. Some projects fail to achieve their schedule or budget goals or fail to deliver everything initially promised. Other projects simply fail altogether. Many of the problems faced by projects can be avoided, or at least contained, by effective project management practices.

On-time delivery 99.5% of the time would be wonderful -- right? Improved morale would lead to better staff retention and higher productivity -- right?

I've just come back from a week in India, where the most common question I was asked was "If there is a recession in the US, what impact will it have on the Indian IT industry?" As if to highlight the possibility of such an event, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before the US Senate, on my second day in Bangalore, that the US economy had reached "zero growth." Nobody in India seems pa

One of the many roles of a modern IT organization is finding and introducing new technology that enhances its parent organization's business objectives. When properly executed, this role enables IT to bring real bottom-line value to its parent by enabling breakthroughs in products, services, operational effectiveness, and/or competitive differentiation.

A couple of months ago, I wrote an Advisor on IBM's new patterns for e-business. In essence, IBM has examined the work it has done for clients and identified and formalized the major, recurring ways in which companies have solved e-business problems. At the moment, IBM has documented eight high-level e-business patterns:

Risk management is a critical part of project management, but it has one major problem -- the word "risk." This word is ruining the subject, and we should do something about it.