Personalization is often considered a tool for customizing Web sites. But, as you will see, the techniques of personalization go far beyond Web sites. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that within a relatively brief period of time -- perhaps as little as a decade -- all human/computer interactions will be intensely personalized.

Systems Architecture

It has been more than 13 years since Kodak signed its landmark IT outsourcing decisions with IBM, Business Land, and DEC.

Collaboration

Continuous partial attention will become the most common mode of human interaction with the most popular technology, many work tasks, and much leisure time.

Organizations are sailing on choppy waters these days. Seemingly endless challenges in the world economy, paired with safety and security concerns, are tossing organizations recklessly into hazardous shoals. Demands for timeliness, cost-effectiveness, and quality continue to be the standard du jour.

This Executive Report provides practical advice on how to prepare your organization to take advantage of future changes in software. The software industry has been and will continue to be buffeted by fads and hyped information in addition to truly transformative technology.

Business intelligence (BI) decision-support initiatives are expensive cross-organizational endeavors. These initiatives involve extracting and merging disparate business data from online transaction processing systems, from batch systems, and from externally syndicated data sources.

For corporate IT departments, pressure to cut costs and improve performance has never been greater.

As we will discuss, there have been a number of recent improvements in patent protection for software and business models. These improvements make it easier to gain and maintain stronger control of many forms of software assets, thereby making it easier to license them more profitably and effectively.

Web services technologies based on XML and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) are changing the face of distributed computing.

Companies are now applying data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) to their supply chain operations. This analytic field, called supply chain intelligence (SCI), holds great promise for optimizing supply chain operations. However, SCI involves considerably more than just performing analysis on an ad hoc basis.

Today, a new debate rages: agile software development versus rigorous software development.

-- Jim Highsmith, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council

IT Industry

Declining stock market valuations have created an incentive to acquire new systems by acquiring the companies that own them. The challenge of integrating these secondhand systems will be substantial and will force us to reexamine and rethink our enterprise system architecture (ESA).

Why rethink the IT function? There have been many articles in recent popular technology and business journals questioning the need for the chief information officer (CIO) role and internal corporate IT departments.

This Executive Report discusses the challenges that legacy applications and data structures place on organizations attempting to meet a wide variety of business requirements along with options for addressing these challenges. Leveraging legacy applications to meet time-critical business requirements is not a luxury in today's competitive business environment -- it is a necessity.

by Bob Shearer and Bruce Taylor

"Science Finds -- Industry Applies -- Man Conforms"

-- Motto of the Chicago World's Fair, 1933

Agile project management creates an opportunity for a business to comanage a project with its IT department. This Executive Report explains how comanagement works and how to maximize the project's return on investment (ROI). After all, ROI is the only important measure of success in agile project management.

In the past several years, application service providers (ASPs) and external service providers (XSPs) have become increasingly common for hosted applications, storage, security, performance monitoring, and other activities.

Security

Not long ago, I received a call from the CFO of a Fortune 500 company about to write a check for $30 million for a network and systems management framework.

Editor's Note: This report addresses component and application architectures in detail and builds on the discussion covered in the author's previously published report, "Making Components Work" (see Cutter Consortium Distributed Enterprise Architecture Executive Report, Vol. 4, No. 9).

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the purposeful and coordinated monitoring of your competitor(s), wherever and whomever they may be, within a specific marketplace. Your competitors are those firms that you consider rivals and with whom you compete for market share. CI also involves determining what your rivals are planning to do before they do it.

This Executive Report introduces the concepts and reasons for the rapid growth of Web services for the corporate intranet, extranets, and the Internet. It begins with a nontechnical introduction, relating Web services to other more familiar technologies. It then discusses the concepts of Web services in more technical detail, with some typical examples and applications.