System Architecture

E-business and e-commerce are emerging as powerful economic drivers for integrated applications and are pushing organizations into premature integration solutions.

This report is about how different the world will be in just a few short years. As an IT professional (or an executive involved with IT), you will find that the pace of technology change and the velocity of your business processes is so accelerated that there's barely enough time to maintain your current market position, let alone explore radical new ones.

Only recently have most companies started to seriously consider the changes they must make to their core information systems in order to successfully deploy major applications on the Internet, intranet, and related forms of open distributed computing. Companies were largely caught flat-footed by the rapid rise of the Internet and are having a tough time playing catch-up.

In its early incarnations, IT outsourcing was synonymous with the transfer of data-processing operations. It was simple to segregate and outsource data processing -- its hardware, software, and people resources were easily quantified, priced, and bundled.

Software Development

Data quality is a major problem in all large organizations and will become one of the major issues facing IT management in the 21st century.

This issue of the Executive Report discusses the resurgence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the next generation of decision support applications.

Software robustness is a problem that everybody cares about but few people address in their products. The average project has several weeks scheduled for testing, mostly in the weeks before deployment. Of course, since most software ends up behind schedule and over budget, testing often gets shortchanged. Most companies will cut into testing time before they'll move a launch deadline.

This report looks at how you identify and model systems and business-IT alignment requirements. It offers some examples of how the methodology can actually be applied both in traditional systems/technology project selection and management, and then in the larger business-IT alignment arena.

The concept of software components -- units for the construction of applications -- is well-established in languages and development tools. Indeed, the basic capability for components is present even in conventional applications. The problem is that, in most software applications, elements are put together in a way that prohibits change.

This report is about how you identify and model requirements -- all requirements. The essence of the argument made here is that all the good stuff we've learned about systems requirements management can be extended to every type of requirements management.

This Executive Report is the last in a series of four installments that examines how companies should approach the transition of their enterprise operations from "traditional computing" to "component computing." In our view, this is one of the most critical transitions most organizations will make in the next decade.

This Executive Report focuses on how you identify the technologies most likely to keep your company growing and profitable. The explosion in technology has changed the ways you buy and apply technology, and it has forever changed expectations about how technology can and should influence your connectivity to customers, suppliers, and employees.

Distributed computing has been a seductive, but mostly elusive, ideal for the computing industry for decades. Lower costs and reduced dependence on central systems are two reasons why the idea of distributed processing and data out into the field where they are actually used have been attractive to many companies.

This report is about how you educate your workers, your managers, and your executives. Ultimately, it is about learning. But the emphasis here is on practical learning strategies, not "pie-in-the-sky, wouldn't-it-be-nice-to-have" strategies.

Today's state-of-the-art in computer and software security is dismal. The main reason for this is that most companies do not have a deep enough understanding of the serious technical risks that exist to make intelligent decisions about reducing those risks. For the most part, companies simply do not have qualified personnel to aid them in making appropriate decisions.

This report is about how you should organize your IT professionals both within your company and extending from it. Obviously, this subject is one of the most politically charged areas IT can face. Any time you fool around with organization, trouble can't be far behind.

With the enormous interest in e-business, both within the IT industry and on Wall Street, every organization is looking at redefining itself into an e-business, or at least developing an e-business strategy. This report looks at the key ingredients in defining and implementing a successful e-business technology solution.

This report is about how you spend your IT dollars. If you're a big organization in a vertical industry such as insurance, you're probably still trying to support your lines of business with, for the most part, your inhouse IT professionals. If you're at a bank, you're probably in the same boat.

This report is the third in a series of reports examining how companies should approach their enterprise-wide transition from "traditional" computing to component computing. So far, we have discussed the initiation and concept phases (Vol. 1, No. 1 and Vol. 2, No.

This report is about money -- lots of money. In case you've been hiding out for a decade or so, IT organizations are collectively spending just over US $1 billion per day just on the external procurement of IT services. Yes, that's right: the $1 billion per day is exclusive of hardware costs.

Past Executive Reports in this series have discussed various ways of defining a corporate computing architecture. In most cases, these architectures are organized around a collection of vendor products or developed to organize a specific environment.

The area of measurement is a fascinating one because everyone thinks they measure lots of things, yet almost no one does. We think we know what we have, who works for us, their skill sets, the applications they use, how happy our customers are, and the rate at which we're really growing. But, most often, we don't.

For nearly a decade, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has been developing a comprehensive standard for specifying distributed processing systems. This standard, the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP), describes the foundations of distributed processing, including key definitions of terminology and an overall architectural framework.

This report is the second in a series of four installments that examines how companies should approach their enterprise-wide transition from traditional computing to component computing.