I've been doing quite a bit of reading, thinking, and writing about e-business development recently. I've especially focused on the kinds of business process changes that typically occur when a large organization decides to transition to an e-business model. In this Advisor, I want to briefly summarize three of the five major drivers that I've observed.

During the last decade or so, as software engineers were required to master more complex technologies, our typical response was to know less and less about the business we supported. IT roles became stratified: programmers had to know the technical idiosyncrasies, systems analysts had to know the business idiosyncrasies, and for some period of your career you could be stuck between these two worlds as a programmer-analyst.

As everyone knows by now, US District Judge Thomas Jackson has ruled that "Microsoft maintained its monopoly power by anticompetitive means and attempted to monopolize the Web browser market ... (thereby violating) ...

Model-based approaches have long been premised on the fact that it is an order of magnitude cheaper to change an exploratory diagram at feasibility than it is to make the same change to the production code, as evidenced by studies carried out in the early 1980s. E-business reinforces the impact of this message by raising the bar for high-quality software. No longer is software designed for single, known individual users; it is designed for vast numbers of anonymous users.

Application availability is increasingly becoming a significant business risk management issue for major IT data centers. Why a business risk issue rather than an IT risk issue?

One of the more interesting developments at the Object Management Group's (OMG) EAI Conference in February involves the OMG's XML standard, called XMI (XML Meta Interchange).

Years ago, I started noticing people doing the wrong things at work. I first saw this while working in a computer lab. We worked with the leading edge computer hardware, software, and peripherals -- the best toys available. The problem was that people were looking for problems so they could buy the solutions. These people were wonderful problem solvers and spent their time doing that. They were comfortable solving problems rather than defining them; doing versus thinking. The trouble was, they often solved the wrong problems.

Attacking an entrenched enemy head-on, say by storming the beach at Normandy, usually results in heavy losses. The enemy just sits in his bunker and picks off targets of opportunity. Victory may finally be achieved by overrunning enemy positions, but casualties will be high. A better strategy is to avoid the enemy's strength by outflanking him and attacking in unobvious ways.

In December, when I reviewed component retailers in the Component Development Strategies newsletter, I identified two leading companies that were each trying to create a market for components: Flashline.com (http://www.flashline.com) and ComponentSource (http://www.componentsource.com).

In response to Pamela Hollington's recent e-mail advisor titled " Lessons from Roofers: Managing the Known Unknowns" (16 February 2000), Mr. Bill Donovan, publisher of Inside Healthcare Computing, wrote this:

While the computer industry has known about the Linux operating system for a few years now, it's interesting to see that it's gaining the attention of the popular media as well as the Wall Street investment crowd.

In the current climate of e-business froth, the business-IT strategy development process appears to be a cumbersome effort, a luxury that can only push the firm further behind in the race with the various dot-com activities of competitors.

Paul Evitts, the president of neoLogistiks in Toronto, has just published a very interesting book: A UML Pattern Language (Macmillan Technical Publishing, Software Engineering Series, 2000. ISBN 1-57870-118-X).

Like most consultants, I spend an uncommon amount of time on airplanes. I'll admit to sometimes enjoying the quiet time away from e-mail and telephones to work or read. On a recent flight to a client site, I was poring over the February issue of The Atlantic Monthly.