The reality of sustainable competitive advantage through information technology will remain elusive to the majority of organizations. We all understand the fundamental reasons: as long as IT is freely available to all industry participants, they will pursue their optimal use of it, either as leaders or as followers. Any early advantages will eventually be competed away.

In last week's Advisor, I mentioned that the Chinese information agency is encouraging government agencies in China to use Red Flag Linux, rather than Microsoft Windows. I want to follow up with some more general comments on Linux this week.

Medical examiners don't do autopsies for the benefit of the deceased. Those procedures are for the benefit of the living, either for piece of mind in knowing what killed a friend or relative or for public safety in being able to identify a communicable disease or bring a killer to justice. By focusing on the living rather than the dead, postmortem examinations attempt to advance the standard of living for those left behind.

A number of IT alignment issues are related to the difficulties in hiring staff. Let's assume you're in "constant hiring" mode -- you continually get resumes, interview people, and decide on whether to hire various candidates. But are you asking questions that get you accurate answers about the candidates?

This Advisor will arrive right in the midst of Microsoft's introduction of Windows 2000 Professional. Microsoft's marketing machine will be going full tilt, and the media, which is always looking for an easy story, will be talking about it almost non-stop.

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.