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.

If I was going to give a new corporate architect one phrase to help him or her think creatively about the next several years, that phrase would be "hand-held wireless digital devices." I've purposely used a rather vague p

When it comes to measurement, the IT industry acts strangely. While other industries depend on measurement, tracking, and control as keys to profitability, the IT industry has yet to embrace measurement on a widespread basis. Even when it recognizes the merits of software measurement, the expectations for it are often unrealistic. Software practitioners want a silver-bullet metric that can answer any development question and do it to several-decimal-point accuracy.

I have been working with a large group of traditional software developers, introducing them to the use case technique for documenting system requirements. I have encountered some very strong and unexpected resistance to the use case approach from these developers, as represented by the following comments:

Although rather technical and a bit vague, one of the most important efforts under way in the OMG (Object Management Group) is the development of "profiles."

In the first three articles in this series, I identified a maturity model for Internet technology adoption (below). This article focuses on how companies can move from Level 2 to Level 3.

The world of e-business systems is commonly associated with highly developed technical skills, ranging from Web-wizardry, graphic design ability, and HTML/XML/Java programming to knowledge of component standards such as CORBA, MTS, and EJB. The design talent to configure such systems in very short time periods also receives lots of attention.