I recently conducted an e-business visioning session with the executive management team of a company in the financial industry. The inspiration for the meeting was the CEO's concern over whether an e-business project proposed by the company's IT department was aligned with the strategic business opportunities offered by the Internet. At first blush, the IT proposal seemed incremental.

Ever since XML was introduced, people have been talking about the possibility that it could be used as a kind of Internet middleware. Skeptics have pointed out that XML is a document format. It isn't middleware -- it lacks any of the services traditionally associated with middleware, including the ability to locate distributed components, transactions, security, and so forth.

People who design or code something shouldn't test it. The classic reason is they may not see problems that others can. I've recently stumbled onto another reason, and that reason can save projects time and money.

Many years ago I remember someone explaining to me that the reason the Roman Colosseum was still (more or less) standing was due to the fact that the people who tried to tear it down and use it for a stone quarry in the Middle Ages were less skilled than the engineers who built it originally.

This is the fourth Advisor in my series on risk management.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) continues to haunt the thinking of those who are tasked with designing large e-business applications.

Some of you have probably heard of Extreme Programming, or XP, as it is usually called. XP is a lightweight software development methodology that advocates (Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and others) claim is a way of developing high-quality software with low schedule and budget risk.

A colleague of mine tells a funny story about interviewing for a job with Sun Microsystems when she was nearing completion of her MBA at Stanford University, California, USA. It was the mid-1980s. Sun was an exciting young company operating in the shadow of larger rivals such as Apollo and Computervision (remember them?).

I've been playing around with an idea for several months in conjunction with a new book I am working on. In effect, I thought about extending the popular "patterns" approach to provide a way to help business managers think about the kinds of changes they could make in their organizations. A lot of companies are thinking about transitioning to e-business models.

How can we facilitate cross-media e-business and utilize next-generation e-services to empower virtual channels that target wireless initiatives? The challenge of engineering global solutions is to innovate end-to-end metrics that target mission-critical applications to develop the organization's killer portals.

My experience building and deploying e-business applications over the past two years has been quite 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.

In Business Week this week, I read of a gentleman who traded stock with E*Trade. On the side, he sold an older computer via Yahoo! Classifieds. The sale went quickly and he got a bank- certified check for his computer. Unfortunately, the check was a phony, written by a cybercrook that the FBI was after. The gentleman didn't know any of this and deposited the certified check into his E*Trade account.

It has long been a given that accurately estimating project effort is virtually impossible without data from other, similar projects. Unfortunately, in the world of Internet time, not many teams have accurate metrics from past projects; moreover, the likelihood that any new project is truly similar to past projects is slim.