Editor's note: This Executive Report is the second in a two-part series on enterprise integration (EI). The first, "Enterprise Integration: Business's New Frontier" (see Distributed Enterprise Architecture Executive Report, Vol. 4, No. 12), covers the rationale and architecture for enterprise integration.

I attended John Zachman's ZIFA Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, in the fall of 1999 (ZIFA stands for the Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement). During the conference, John and I were discussing the current state of affairs in IT, specifically the burgeoning rate of disparity in all aspects of the field.

If software were defect-free, we could effectively cut development effort by almost half. 1 Even more compelling, if there were no defects in our software, we could reallocate most of the maintenance and support resources to developing new features rather than fixing defects.

Software Development

Product development organizations will continue to be early adopters of agile development and project management methods.

This Executive Report begins with an examination of the IT context in which we find ourselves: a general decline in capital IT spending; a post-dot-com crash era whose technical and financial aftermath refuses to die; and no consensus as to what the next "killer app" will be or when it will be deployed.

The software world is full of paradoxes. A huge amount has been learned since programmers started writing assembly language nearly 50 years ago, but most of that hard-won knowledge lies unused and ignored. The same mistakes are repeated over and over, year after year. Meanwhile, the industry is swept by periodic waves of intense enthusiasm for the latest innovation.

Now, more than ever, companies are keenly aware of the tremendous benefits associated with understanding current and prospective customers from an economic, attitudinal, and behavioral perspective.

For a service company that delivers quality IT applications, project management (PM) is a fundamental discipline. In fact, project management -- strictly connected with a professional quality management approach -- can become the winning factor in the highly competitive area of application development, where the cost/time/quality factors need to be managed together.

IT Industry

This report is divided into three sections. The first section provides an overview of the history of clicks and mortar strategies. The second details two in-depth case studies: Dell Computer and Charles Schwab. The third section discusses developing a clicks and mortar strategy, including the role of culture and the strategy formulation process.

Modeling is an important part of any software process. Prescriptive software processes such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP) [17] include modeling activities: three of the six core process disciplines (formerly called workflows) focus on modeling, and the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) [7] introduces a fourth modeling-oriented workflow called Infrastructure Management.

Few people would quibble with the benefits and opportunities awaiting companies that build, nurture, and maintain strong relationships with their customers.

Extreme Programming (XP) has a lot of practices for programmers, and it sounds like it might be just for programmers. But nothing could be further from the truth. XP is a software process focused on rapid delivery of value to the enterprise. In this Executive Report, I'll examine how this comes about.

Have you ever tried to arrange dinner at a restaurant with a group of 20 friends? Agreeing on a restaurant in the first place is quite a chore when you take 20 different food preferences into account. But that's just the beginning.

The discipline of risk management is explicitly focused on endeavors where the unknowns are large and potentially critical. This has always been the character of IT projects, but through the 1990s, the principles of risk management have frequently been honored only in the breach: organizations doing risky IT work routinely understated the extent of their risks in order to prolong funding.

How do people make decisions? To make a business decision -- be it strategic, tactical, or operational -- people use information that they consider to be relevant. A lot of information is provided and used by modern-day, ubiquitous information technology. However, information and data without context and shared meaning are useless.

Knowledge management (KM) provides approaches and means for enterprises to create, transfer, and apply knowledge deliberately and systematically. KM is credited with creating practices and systems that allow people to work more effectively to great advantage for their enterprises.

At the dawn of the 21st century, software development is an international activity. It is not uncommon to find parts of development organizations dispersed in distant locations. The world of software is indeed shrinking, and the global village is becoming more and more a reality.

IT Industry

IT Industry

Companies that invest now in new IT infrastructure will emerge from the present downturn markedly stronger than their less confident competitors.

Many studies have been devoted to new requirements devolving from the advent of the Internet Age, particularly the needs to manage fast and constant change and for 24/7 resilience. Yet the role of testing in all this has been strangely neglected. In this Executive Report, we explain why testing strategies also need to change, and how.

This Executive Report advocates that organizations striving to excel at exploiting information technology adopt a new IT mindset. Why is a new mindset necessary? As others have noted before, by changing how we look at the world, we can change the world itself.

Editor's note: This Executive Report is the first of a two-part series on enterprise integration. The second installment, "Making Enterprise Integration Real," will be published in the first quarter of 2002.

Within any industry, companies are guided by the same business directives as well as by the same laws and regulations. Therefore, at any company, the business processes that guide both tactical and strategic operations are expected to be invoked in well-understood business scenarios.

I have been a systems professional for more than 20 years. For two of those years I was a consultant, where I was enlightened about the "elevator conversation." It goes something like this: