I'm probably widely considered an enthusiastic supporter of Java and Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) application servers. I think both hold great potential for the development of important enterprise systems.

In today's environment of doing more with less, organizations are finding themselves with staff members that are burning out fast and are unable to deal with the growing work load.

Alert Webster, there's a new word in the English language: Amazoned. The definition: It's what happens to a business that doesn't keep up with the Internet economy.

With the collapse of the dot-com industry, we don't hear much talk these days about the Internet revolutionizing mankind; Nicholas Negroponte's 1995 paean, Being Digital, probably wouldn't sell very well today. Indeed, with the collapse of the high-tech stock market, it's hard to find anyone saying positive things about the benefits of technology.

In a previous Advisor ( 12 July 2000), I discussed how to conduct an identification session that surfaces key impediments to an organizational or divisional objective. Armed with that information, you are ready to begin the second phase of the facilitation.

Time passes quickly. It's hard to imagine that I've been writing Architecture Advisors for three years now. In that time, of course, the world of software development has evolved rapidly, and, as I considered what to write this month, I thought that it might be good to step back and think, very broadly, about the status of software architectures today.

Each year, members of our community present new methods of building and maintaining software. It is our task to be open-minded, learn, and think. We must always look at our people and the product we are building before we decide which process or method to use.

If you are charged with selecting or implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution for your organization, it is imperative that you understand the business drivers that propel this application area. The CRM solution space is big and growing.

Software architects at large companies who are focused on the design of enterprise application integration (EAI) systems that can link existing enterprise applications with the latest e-business systems face a horrendous task -- there are so many applications, written in so many different languages, running on such a wide variety of platforms.

Back in the Y2000 days, I got into a little trouble for going against commonly held beliefs. A number of industry pundits claimed that the Y2000 challenge wasn't a technical problem, but simply a project management challenge of considerable magnitude. Classic project management theory says that in the project-constraint triangle, one is bound by work, resources, and time.

Trying to achieve effective business-IT alignment is inherently a risky activity. It implies the undertaking of important decisions, under conditions of uncertainty. Typically, alignment decisions have long-term impacts, they are difficult to undo, and we are never sure whether they will produce the desired outcome. This scenario of uncertainty applies whether we're deciding on a radical change to our IT infrastructure or on a gradual change to our business processes.

Those who know something of my career in computing know that I started as a technology analyst covering the artificial intelligence (AI) market in the early 1980s. More specifically, I wrote Cutter Information Corp.'s Expert Systems Strategies newsletter for almost 10 years.

There's an amazingly overlooked iceberg of problems in end-user computing. Spreadsheets are developed by people who are very skilled in their main job function, be it finance, procurement, or production planning, but often have had no formal training in spreadsheet use. IT auditors focus on mainstream information systems but regard spreadsheets as user problems, outside their concerns.