Piecemeal, poorly coordinated integration initiatives can send an enterprise one step forward and two steps back. Integration is at the top of many corporate agendas; but what are we really trying to integrate? And how do these efforts interrelate across business units, data architectures, applications, suppliers, customers, and other integration initiatives?

Microsoft has made a number of major announcements in the last couple of weeks. If one was a cynic, one might suggest that Microsoft is eager to drive up its stock value and to counteract the despair surrounding Judge Jackson's order to break up the company into two separate companies.

The quality of a Web site is fundamentally based in its information content -- if that content is hard to locate and understand, the value of the site is significantly diminished. Here are five reasons why you should conduct usability testing of your e-commerce site:

Over the past four years, operational risk management activities have evolved from simple information gathering to a functional discipline with dedicated staff using established formal policies and procedures.

Readers who have read articles I have written over the course of the last decade will know that in the early 1990s I used to devote more time to rule-based techniques.

The more I'm involved in project planning meetings and project reviews, the more I see a particular problem crop up.

Microsoft has a long tradition of renaming things. In the case of its component standards, they have gone from OLE and OCXs to VBXs, and from COM and ActiveXs to Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). Now that Windows 2000 is out and COM and MTS have been combined, it's time for another name change, and apparently the new name is DNA components.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Cutter Consortium Summit 2000 and, over the course of this year's Summit, I sensed an undercurrent around Extreme Programming (XP) versus more conventional, model-driven development. I don't remember the issue being specifically framed for formal discussion and debate, but it was alluded to several times.

Recently, I was rereading one of my favorite stories about strategy implementation, It's Not Luck, by Eli Goldratt (North River Press, 1994). Once again, I was struck by a particular insight the protagonist has that many managers never acquire. Let me explain.

Sun held its annual Java Users Conference in San Francisco this past week. There were about 5,000 very enthusiastic people in attendance -- mostly young developers eager to learn the latest Java programming tricks.

I recently had a conversation with an old colleague from my quality assurance days on the topic of configuration management. As is typical in these conversations, the first challenge was to make sure we were talking about the same thing.