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.

Over the past 18 months, wireless technology has been the victim of its own hype. The auctioning of global spectrum to support new, high-speed, third-generation (3G) wireless networks was accompanied by promises of high-speed, multimedia Internet access to cell phones and wirelessly enabled personal digital assistants (PDAs).

For the past 10 years, the Object Management Group (OMG) has been strongly identified with its first and best-known standard --CORBA. Other specifications, such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML), are arguably at least as important and may even be more widely used, but to date they have been kept in the background by the strength of the CORBA brand.

As organizations are feeling pressure from the oscillating economic climate, changing government regulations, new customer demands, and high employee turnover, they are grasping at technology solutions to halt their steady loss of business knowledge -- business knowledge that was never complete or comprehensive in the first place.

For most of us, it is a rare day when we aren't caught wondering about the pace of change confronting us. Along with those changes, new business ideas and concepts appear, disappear, sometimes reappear, or are otherwise transformed or forgotten.

William Zucker (WZ): We are meeting today to discuss procurement and, in particular, procurement as it applies to outsourcing. I know that at Vantage Partners, one of your focuses is the interconnect between vendor and customer and that you have worked with customers and vendors to help in business alignment when they are parties to an outsourcing arrangement.

If your fiscal year begins January 1, you probably had already begun creating your IT plans and budgets before September 11.

It's Tuesday morning, still dark. Monday has passed and already you feel behind. The parking lot is empty. Perfect. You can get some real work done before the barrage begins. As you sip your first cup of office coffee (too bad Starbucks doesn't open this early), you start the routine. First, review your calendar for the day. It's light, but that will change by 9 am.

The latest buzzword in the software industry is "Web services." Web services will become an important element of the new and future generation of distributed and e-business systems and are a natural evolution in the maturity of the software industry.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a very popular topic in today's business environment. Hit any Web search engine with the initials "CRM" and you are likely to generate hundreds (or even thousands) of responses.

There has been an increasing interest in and awareness of requirements. There are conferences devoted to the topic of requirements, many articles and books have been published on the subject, and our consulting experience shows us that organizations are prepared to invest effort in improving their requirements processes. This report discusses what requirements are and why they are such an important ingredient in project management.

Note: The present Council Opinion is the first of three on the subject of a pandemic -- an extensive disruption of our information infrastructure due to natural or malicious causes. The overall assertion is that such a pandemic is likely in our near future and that companies, governments, and economies need to take steps to buffer themselves from pandemic effects.

Security

As the amount of collected information from multiple sources and formats grows (witness the growth in storage requirements due to the explosion of the Internet), the ability to derive value from the mountains of data has significantly decreased.

Rework is the single most costly activity in software projects. It consists of finding and fixing defects that were introduced earlier in the project.1 Given the labor-intensive nature of software development, defects are unavoidable.

System Architecture

Within the next decade, XML will have a major impact on the way that application systems are put together (interfaced) and will revolutionize the interconnection between businesses and individuals as well.

From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary:

Col·lab·o·rate

Making components work means making them deliver on their promises -- timeliness, flexibility, and efficiency. These are among the top challenges faced by today's IT organizations.

Some time ago, I spoke at a conference about the value of IT and the related challenge of business-IT alignment. In the middle of the presentation, a fellow in the back stood up and berated me for emphasizing the separation between IT and business.

Microsoft's .NET is many things. It is not a product or even just a marketing campaign; it is an all-encompassing vision of a future Internet and the new ways of working and living that the new Internet will make possible. This vision sees a new Web, one that connects people to services and information everywhere and makes collaboration and sharing information much easier.

It's a great time to be a technologist. Over the last few decades (and with no end in sight), there's been stunning progress in any number of information technologies. Communications bandwidth and networks are expanding, seemingly without limit. Databases capable of storing ever-increasing amounts of data in evermore complicated ways are being developed.

In February 2001, a group of "who's who" in software development methodologies convened in Snowbird, Utah, USA, to create the Agile Alliance and deliver a Manifesto for Agile Software Development (www.agilealliance.org). The Agile Alliance is a group of methodologists who have shed the use of traditional methodologies and processes. This decision was not taken lightly.

Organizational Matters

There's an old saying that to really understand someone you have to walk a mile in his or her shoes. The underlying lesson is simple: you need to gain that person's perspective if you are to grasp his or her needs and issues. Without perspective, the best we can do is speculate about needs, intents, and motives. Alignment, if it occurs at all, is accidental.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) represents a simple initiative to provide a data representation for the Web. In just a few short years, XML has revolutionized data and communications across the Internet. XML is now a flexible data storage medium for delivering specialized content to browsers and handheld wireless computing devices.

Many organizations have made enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems the backbone of their corporate transaction-processing environments. The most popular ERP systems today are the packaged enterprise applications marketed by SAP AG (SAP R/3), PeopleSoft, Inc. (PeopleSoft Human Resources), and Oracle Corporation (Oracle Applications, Oracle Financials).