Last summer, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Paul Harmon posed the question, "Is it too early to start talking about 'Intelligent E-Business Applications?'" in his Distributed Computing Architecture/e-Business E-Mail Advisor, " Artificial Intelligence Lives" (2 August 2000).

"A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow."

-- Conrad Brean (played by Robert De Niro in the 1997 movie Wag The Dog)

Vendor evaluation is a continuous process that permeates the entire acquisition process. Rather than being viewed as an event or a step in the procurement process, it should be tightly woven into the entire outsourcing effort -- from initial project planning and feasibility studies to the request for proposal (RFP) process, contract negotiation, and relationship management.

Market Mechanisms

Ultimately, most capital employed by successful firms will be human, not physical, and it will flow, like financial capital, to its most productive use.

There are now around 200 million online users of the Internet, with an estimated growth of 70,000 new users each day. During the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, IBM claimed that www.olympics.com, which it maintained, received more than 11 billion hits.

As we enter the 21st century, the IT industry exhibits two bewilderingly contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, we are constantly being told of the savage commercial pressure under which business operates, the cutthroat competitiveness of global markets, and the consequent need to squeeze out every last drop of productivity.

Better, faster, cheaper -- the siren song of software development. Each new era of information technology belts out a chorus or two, and the e-business era is no exception. In the e-business version, faster is the lead singer, and better and cheaper sing harmony. Time to market, first-mover advantage, Internet time, getting Amazoned -- these phrases and others pepper discussions of e-business. Speed is everything.

Outsourcing is an inevitable component of almost every company's IT strategy. In an age of heightened competition, when many companies are refocusing on their core competencies to remain nimble, outsourcing IT activities provides a way to improve operating efficiencies, reduce overhead, and improve service.

Collaboration

Instant messaging (IM) will become a major force in the way organizations design their communications and Web sites, especially in the areas of customer service and customer support.

Due to the increasing global nature of business, as well as the rapid growth of e-business, the number and scope of risks and opportunities for e-businesses is rising on an unanticipated scale.

E-projects are large projects that must be delivered rapidly, are both research-like and mission-critical, and have to be managed in a turbulent business and technology environment.

-- Jim Highsmith e-Project Management Practice Director and Senior Consultant Cutter Consortium

There is only one constant in this universe, and that constant is ... change.

-- Albert Einstein

Government

Government at all levels will find itself increasingly challenged to tax revenue derived from information. Market forces will tend to punish governments that apply tax burdens to information flow.

The third biggest killer in the UK is preventable medical error. It is the cause of more than 100 deaths every day -- an estimated 40,000 deaths annually. The figure rises to 120,000 deaths per annum in the US, where preventable medical error is estimated to lead to injuries in just under 3% of cases, at an annual cost of US $1 billion in terms of wasted bed days.

In our personal lives, we all tend to gravitate toward roles and responsibilities that make use of our strongest skills. The family member with the best cooking ability usually prepares the meals. The person with a head for finances balances the checkbook and pays the bills. Every individual is naturally adept in some area, and these skills form our core competencies.

You can't spell business without "e." And business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce is hot right now. Analysts predict that B2B sales over the Internet will reach US $500 billion by early next year and be up to $2 trillion by 2004 (it is possible that they may even reach $10 trillion).

In this era of e-everything, are e-projects merely an extension of the hype? One could ask the same question about e-business or e-commerce. Every disruptive technology or emerging market involves new definitions -- sometimes endless arguments over new terminology and whether or not there are meaningful distinctions.

Many of Cutter Consortium's Executive Reports are intended to provide "how to" information -- this is not one of those reports.

Software Development

The "task and artifact" focus of traditional process improvement has run its course. The next wave focuses instead on skills and relationships. This trend requires process specialists to gain new skills, retool, and rethink their relationship to software projects.

The primary reason software organizations are implementing critical chain project management is that it allows them to substantially reduce the elapsed time of their projects without:

This report outlines various architectural options for an XML infrastructure, with an emphasis on application development in the middle tier of Web sites. It provides information about using XML data servers to store and access XML data. After reading this report, you will be able to make decisions about the type of XML data server that is best suited for your application needs.

Outsourcing involves business decisions, financial considerations, strategic direction, and so on -- but don't forget, it also involves people. And it is the people who will either make outsourcing work or cause it to flounder. Think about it: management is just a group of people in the role of managers. The "organization" everyone talks about is made up of people.

E-Business

The wireless Web will turn out to be bigger than the wired one; moreover, the wireless Web revolution will happen faster than the wired (current) version of the Internet.

Q: What do Nokia, Ericsson, and DoCoMo have in common?

What causes an extremely successful and highly innovative company to lose 63% of its market value in one day? How is it that a consortium of some of the most recognized travel industry companies is unable to build an automated reservation system when it possesses tremendous depth of experience in its creation and operation?

The application server market is in a period of huge growth as new products appear, existing products are modified and merged, and organization after organization moves all or part of its operations to the Web. But by far the most significant factor in the growth of this market comes from the discovery that decades-old products are, in fact, application servers.