I met with some IT managers recently to discuss concerns over a decision to revamp enterprise-wide business processes and systems. These managers did not make this decision, yet they were responsible for implementing it. They felt that deploying a software package as a way to revamp their business was an ill-conceived strategy and that the project plan was not viable.

The Object Management Group (OMG) has just announced that it's back in the conference business. It will sponsor INTEGRATE 2001. The conference, which aims to attract about 2,500 attendees, will be held in New York City on 19-21 September 2001.

We often experience depression after a success. As IT managers, we can accept these postsuccess blues and deal with them, or we can ignore them and suffer the consequences. We need to plan for success and for the blues that can follow.

It's been said that the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov had 10 typewriters in his basement for the multitude of writing projects that he engaged himself with. It's also been reported that the average person can effectively handle only about four concurrent tasks at once, with the maximum being about seven. Clearly, Isaac Asimov was a rare exception in humankind.

When lives are at stake, it pays to learn quickly. The US Army -- in fact, most military and police forces -- uses the concept of an After Action Report (AAR) to promote learning and knowledge transfer. In her recent book, Common Knowledge, author Nancy Dixon characterizes AARs as a form of Serial Transfer of knowledge -- that is, transferring information within a single team, over time.

This is the fifth and last Advisor in my series on risk management.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an Advisor on the role of people in facilitating flexible e-business systems. A couple of months ago, I wrote an Advisor on the role of expert system and neural network techniques in e-business systems. During this past week, I've been reading a good book that I want to recommend to readers.

More than once, after a brief, preliminary requirements meeting, I have been asked, "So, you know what we want, right?"

A recent survey by Cutter Consortium found that the number-one problem with outsourcing a Web-based project is inadequate project management.

One and one-half million lines of code -- and that's just the beginning.

A number of organizations with high software capability are finding it possible to increase their capability even further by successfully exploiting the concept of software product lines. A software product line is a group of software products that, in relation to their given market or mission and their implementation, have a set of common features and well-understood variations.

The term "server" has become a seriously overused word. There are hardware platforms called servers and there are operating systems called servers (e.g., Windows 2000 Server). At the same time that Microsoft has called one of its 2000 systems a server, it has included a variety of utilities inside Windows that it also calls servers (e.g., Microsoft Transaction Server [MTS], Microsoft Message Server).

As an invited speaker to last week's International Conference on Software Quality (10ICSQ) hosted by the Software Division of the American Society for Quality in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, I had the good fortune to listen to Dr. Chuck Engle, whose topic is the title of this week's Advisor.

I spent a wonderful couple of hours with one of my favorite CIOs yesterday discussing the pros and cons of outsourcing. This is a person who over the last couple of years has pulled more and more of her organization's IT functions back into her shop.