PDI may be the next EAI. Enterprise application integration (EAI) has become a major initiative for many companies. But reading through EAI articles and attending several EAI conferences reveals a major hole in the generic EAI models -- product development.

I have discovered a fatal disease that appears to afflict some organizations that try to practice risk management. This malady is an odd form of myopia. Projects infected with it can only see small problems. Large problems looming directly ahead, problems that would be in the center of any healthy project's field of vision, go completely unseen by the victims of this disease.

I suspect there were a lot of CIOs who frowned as they read in InformationWeek that 3Com is replacing its CIO with the head of its e-business unit. At the same time, the guy who headed up supply chain operations will become the new head of both supply chain operations and all product development, ousting the former head of product development.

Following the invention of the automobile, US car manufacturers dominated the world market for half a century before overseas suppliers challenged their leading position. Today, the majority of software tools and applications originate in the US. The software industry has now reached the half-century mark. Will history repeat itself with offshore developers overtaking this hot market? There are signs that this is a distinct possibility.

Ever since the term computer virus was invented, people have been plumbing the biological world for analogies and ideas to help prevent the spread and seriousness of "human-generated computer viruses." (I put all that in quotes to note that there is nothing necessarily "natural" in computer viruses, they're all manmade and evolve only from a human understanding point of view.

While the Open Source movement conjures up scary scenarios of "free software" for some and Microsoft-bashing for others, moving beyond the heavy rhetoric provides fresh insight into an emerging collaborative development model of software development.

Try this statement on for size:

Many of us have spent the last few weeks watching the twists and turns of the US presidential contest in Florida. Most of us now know more about the election laws of Florida than we know about those of our home state, and each day, it seems, the complexities multiply. Many Americans wonder if it will ever sort itself out.

Many project managers are finding their experiences in deploying e-business applications extremely frustrating. Proof-of-concept evolves rapidly into a pilot project, and before you know it, you are supporting a prototype application in production mode, interacting with back-end transactional systems.

As the number of Web pages grows exponentially, it becomes increasingly important for enterprises to differentiate themselves from the competition. In a world where the competition is just one click away, organizations need strong identities that provide existing and potential customers with the confidence that their needs will be met in the most convenient, reliable way.

There was a good article by Bob Tedeschi in the New York Times (" Retail Battle Returns to the Bricks," http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/20/technology/20ECOMMERCE.html) that discussed how retailers were sleeping more easily these days, now that they no longer worry about being "Amazoned." It's just one of a couple of dozen articles I've been read

We all know about the demand on IT resources and the resulting need to ensure that the projects we work on are business-justified. Yet we continue to commit valuable team resources to projects that have questionable business cases (if they have one at all).

What do "egoless programming" and "pair programming" have in common?

While the rest of technology marketplace has been in the toilet, Microsoft has been chugging along. Maybe not at a record pace, but it's been minting money. Last time I looked, Microsoft had over $40 billion in cash. Pretty good in a really down market.

"That one decision-gradient diagram was the most important piece of the two-day consulting session," said a product development VP client recently.

"It's difficult to speed up development when management takes weeks to make key decisions," laments a Dublin, Ireland, development group whose company executives are in Silicon Valley.