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.

Recently, my work has caused me to spend time in "hosting" or "co-location" facilities. Run by specialized companies such as Exodus, Genuity, Internap, and others, these facilities at first appear to be simply independently owned data centers built to capitalize on the IT outsourcing movement. That's what they are, in part.

Traditionally, there has been a rather sharp distinction between conventional enterprise applications and real-time applications. Regular applications were sometimes expected to provide answers to queries rather quickly, but everyone distinguished between "quick responses" and the kind of responses that were required by process control systems.

Cutter Consortium recently surveyed a group of companies to learn the details of their agreements with their application service providers (ASPs). To begin with, the data shows that only a small number of companies (14%) are currently using ASP services. However, within that group, companies are apparently paying close attention to service levels.