With the winding down of Y2000-related efforts, IT groups must finally face the development backlog that has grown over the past 18 months. But with stiff resistance to further increasing staff, we cannot build all -- or even most -- of the systems requested. So, which projects? What should we build first?

Last week's Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor discussed the problems inherent in bottom-up planning and suggested top-down planning as an alternative. Effective project planning is a key factor for successful business-IT alignment, because aligning IT with the business means you have to keep implementing IT projects successfully.

A few weeks ago, a report appeared suggesting that the government had decided to push in the direction of breaking Microsoft into product-oriented companies. Obviously, a lot of discussion and debate will occur before any intention is realized and this may never happen, but it is apparently the primary option being considered at the moment.

Requirements management (RM) is simple in principle but difficult in practice. The Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) spells out RM in basic terms. RM means to:

How could anything be simpler?

Business-IT alignment is very much about implementing change successfully. As new information technologies emerge, organizations must be attentive to the potential benefits and competitive advantages they can bring to their businesses. They must also be capable of adjusting their current IT solutions quickly and regularly.

In a former life, I used to spend a lot of time developing training programs for companies. Initially I believed that the instructional designer should be someone different from the presenter. Instructional designers worried about sequencing and learning outcomes, while presenters delivered a performance. People I knew argued about how to train new instructional designers. Should you hire someone with a background in instructional design and then let him or her learn a subject matter?

During the weeks and months preceding the Y2000 event, there was heightened attention paid to information security. Many organizations started to become concerned about viruses that might be launched to coincide with Y2000, disguised to resemble Y2000 bugs rather than security breaches. There was a lot of attention paid to keeping up with patches to fix security holes in commercial products and more effort spent on installing intrusion-detection products.

We all operate in a dynamic market swept by global changes such as Web-inspired technology infrastructure paradigm shifts, privatization, deregulation, and the globalization of industries. Mergers and acquisitions abound as companies seek to remain strong or gain strength in an e-commerce-enabled global marketplace.

As we all know, achieving IT and business alignment is not easy. We must tie business strategy, technology, and people into a comprehensive and synergistic package that, as Paul Strassmann says, will demonstrate a positive relationship between IT and accepted financial measures of performance. However, as my mother used to say, you need to be careful for what you wish for, because you might get it.

The Object Management Group (OMG) has scheduled a workshop on Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) for 7-9 February 2000, in Orlando, Florida, and I think it's a meeting that serious enterprise architects ought to consider attending.

In the first four articles in this series, I identified a maturity model for Internet technology adoption (below). This article focuses on how companies can move from Level 3 to Level 4.

Software robustness is a problem that everybody cares about but few people address in their products. The average project has several weeks devoted to testing, mostly in the weeks before deployment. Of course, most software ends up behind schedule and over budget, and testing is the first thing to get reduced or cut. Thus, much commercial software gets only a couple of days of testing before it is shipped.

There is a vital difference between what is technologically possible and what is culturally doable. In the days when technology was merely an enabler of change, the difference between that which was technologically possible and that which was culturally doable was often the difference between a passing fad and legitimate change.

In February, Microsoft will officially begin to ship the first release of its new Windows 2000 series of operating systems. (It's important to keep in mind what the marketing wordsmiths at Microsoft have done. They have said they were renaming NT 5, Windows 2000. But in fact, they are releasing at least three versions of Windows 2000.