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).

As the new millennium begins, we have almost come full circle in our approach to software design.

Today's competitive economy requires companies to extract more leverage using IT at faster speeds and lower cost. Many companies respond to this pressure by making outsourcing alliances a fundamental part of their business strategy. Outsourcing is seen by companies as a way to offload perceived noncore functions in order to focus on their core skills and gain access to an outsourcing vendor's expertise.

Business-IT alignment can be an elusive challenge for organizations riding the shifting tide of industry changes, globalization, and emerging information technologies. Yet aligning IT with critical business initiatives is essential to the ongoing success and survival of most companies.

Misconceptions about the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) abound. Perhaps the most pernicious is that this vendor-neutral middleware standard, although technically viable, is irrelevant to real-world computing.

The term enterprise information portal (EIP) was first used in a Merrill Lynch report dated 16 November 1998. In this report, Merrill Lynch indicated that EIP systems provide companies with great competitive advantage.

For an industrial company that uses the Web, I don't think there is any end to the opportunities for savings, efficiency, and innovation.... When big companies get on the Web, they see huge benefits because of their relationships, their brands, and their assets.... Large businesses can create shareholder value that overwhelms the value that the dot-coms can create....

Organizational Matters

Recently, the high failure rates of customer relationship management (CRM) technology implementation have gotten a lot of coverage. Some sources cite failure rates as high as 70% in CRM system implementation. Even after successful technology implementation, CRM systems do not necessarily deliver the promised business benefits.

The biggest challenge faced by many organizations conducting business on the Web is maintaining a successful Web site. Successful Web sites attract large volumes of hits, and large volumes of hits stress the software that runs the site. It's not uncommon for sites to be accessed millions of times a day.

Business intelligence (BI) is the set of processes and data structures used to understand a company's business environment in order to support strategic analysis and decisionmaking. The major components of BI are the data warehouse, data marts, decision support interface, and processes to collect data into the data warehouse and deliver it to the business community.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. For a software development or maintenance manager, a typical day involves making a seemingly endless string of decisions:

The growth of the global marketplace and the convergence of the Internet with other new technologies are presenting companies with new challenges and unprecedented opportunities. Some observers view today's rapidly changing business environment as a crisis; others see it as an opportunity. In fact, the Chinese symbol for crisis defines it as both a danger and an opportunity.

Software Development

The use of third-party components places an unexpected and potentially severe limitation on the reliability of software products.

In the 1980s, managers in most companies would have called an IT project with a US $10- or $20-million budget "large." Some really huge companies -- like General Motors, Exxon, or Ford -- did projects with $100-million-plus budgets, but those were pretty rare. In the 1990s though, things changed. Budgets skyrocketed.

Although most organizations today have some sort of firewall protecting their resources, many companies treat the firewall as a "checkbox" -- they think just having one is good enough to keep intruders out. Unfortunately, such an approach is a gross oversimplification of a complex topic.

The only source of knowledge is experience. -- Albert Einstein

It's one thing to talk about being customer focused, it's quite another to actually do it.

We recently faced a dilemma while updating our outsourcing training program: how to find out how companies are really doing with outsourcing.

E-Business

"Why do you rob banks?" the infamous criminal Willie Sutton was reportedly asked. "Because that's where the money is," he replied without hesitation. Bankers protect their assets as an obvious and necessary aspect of business. They understand safes, guards, auditing, reconciling cash accounts, two-person controls, and numerous other techniques to secure their money.

Napster, a free application that enables users to trade music with each other at no cost, is the poster child for an evolution of distributed computing architectures, the peer-to-peer architecture. (The recording industry would likely prefer the verb "pirate" to the word "trade" above.) People typically view Napster in one of the following ways:

Let's go back in time to the mid-1980s when the US Department of Defense (DoD) was faced with huge cost and schedule overruns on its large, software-intensive programs. The Internet had not yet materialized, and the software industry was beset with a steady stream of "silver bullets" (e.g., structured programming, reuse, rapid prototyping, total quality management, reengineering) designed to solve the industry's increasing problems with software development (missed schedules, cost overruns, poor quality).

In 1990, the US spent US $9 billion on IT outsourcing. In 1999, US customers spent $250 billion on IT outsourcing. Dun & Bradstreet predicted worldwide IT outsourcing costs would have reached $1 trillion by the end of 2000. Such spending clearly indicates that IT outsourcing has become an accepted practice worldwide.

IT Industry

Software functionality and other services traditionally provided by internal IT departments will be increasingly delivered "over the Net" via supply chains composed of multiple external service providers.

Integration is one of the leading initiatives in the IT industry today. Many analysts believe that without a workable enterprise integration plan, e-business deployment and business-to-business (B2B) integration will suffer considerably.