Collaboration

Organizational Matters

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

-- Murphy's Law

"Getting more from less" is an oft-repeated cliche, especially in hard economic times. As most IT professionals can attest, pressure on IT costs is stronger than ever, yet executives still expect higher performance. These pressures go beyond wringing more performance from IT staff, extending to the projects and assets managed by the IT organization.

During the past two to three years, both the IT and business communities have been seriously discussing the possibility that Web services may become the next big thing.

Those of us in the technology business tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies and underestimate the long-term impact.

In the past few decades, information technology has become increasingly important to enterprises of every size around the world. IT has literally changed the way the world works. And in the 21st century, not only must organizations continue to reengineer their businesses, they have to do so at breakneck speed.

IT Industry

The technologies being developed today as part of Internet2 will create new opportunities and change the way business is done to an even greater extent than the circa-1990s Internet.

"System" is a word frequently spoken by anyone working with software. But few of those who speak the word realize that "system" denotes a well-defined concept of great importance to the success of software development. Even fewer have a thorough understanding of the system concept and what it implies about how we should manage our businesses and the software that automates them.

Integration remains one of the most important and difficult issues facing IT organizations today. Whether the integration is internal using enterprise application integration (EAI) or external using business-to-business integration (B2Bi), estimates are that at least 40% of IT budgets are directed to integration infrastructure. Multitiered computing, including Web-based applications, is quickly enhancing enterprise IT systems and provides the best hope for efficient and cost-effective integration.

When your friend who lives in the UK tells you that her new telephone number is 020 7262 3395, you write it down. You expect to use the number many times in the future so, rather than just jotting it onto a scrap of paper, you record it in your address book, your computer, or your PDA. This friend lives in inner London, as do you, so when you call this friend, you dial all the digits in the number.

The 1980s and 1990s were decades of pivotal change in corporate management thinking and practice. The US rose to superpower status in the two decades immediately after World War II. US manufacturing prowess was built through mass production of standard goods.

Architecture

Although a great deal of attention has been devoted to the subject of designing and building software, fairly little attention has been spent on the problem of designing and building software projects. Yet there are few software practitioners who would argue that the structure and operation of the software project are not important.

IT Industry

Instant messaging (IM) has entered the global culture over the past few years, transitioning from its humble beginnings as a tool for systems programmers into a pop phenomenon.

Most great athletes are born with great reaction times. Their ability to run faster, hit a ball farther, or avoid a tackle is often predicated on the fact that their neural system is simply faster than their opponents'. In a sense, the same thing is true about enterprises. Great businesses also seem to have great reaction times.

The movement toward e-business has involved a gradual evolution toward Web-enablement of all IT services and systems within the enterprise, integration of services, and centralization of access and management through a Web browser. This movement has coincided with advances in data analysis techniques to a point where diverse techniques applied to data stores might be deemed "business intelligence" (BI).

Computers in the future may weigh no more than one and a half tons.

-- Popular Mechanics, 1949

Here is a sample of the files used to establish links across lexical elements.

Caught in the frenetic rise of the dot-com phenomenon and following hot on the heels of Y2K, IT departments find themselves drowning in a sea of spaghetti logic and a Gordian knot of networked applications and legacy systems. As if that were not enough, the stock market deflation and the loss of business due to the tragic events of 9/11 have further shrunk much-needed IT budgets.