In tough economic times, "getting more from less" is a common refrain. For IT organizations, the pressure on costs is enormous, yet high performance is still expected. After wringing performance gains from IT staff, IT managers are seeking to increase business value by actively managing their application and project portfolios.

Although corporate America is still reeling from the excessive IT spending of the late 1990s, numerous disparate, standalone systems still abound in many organizations as a painful reminder to the myopic and reactive approach to enterprise computing. Many systems acquired (or built) with the intent of addressing only one business problem are now strong candidates for abandonment.

When Tim Berners-Lee speaks, people listen. This stems from the fact that a decade ago Berners-Lee came up with the World Wide Web, and it was the technology behind the Web that made possible the creation of the first browsers, millions of hyperlinked Web sites, and the explosion of the Internet.

The "agile software movement" has reached a point where more and more organizations around the world are beginning to use, or at least experiment with, many of the major ideas involved in agile development.

Every day we struggle to get to work via a transportation system, are kept informed by a news system, and put up with the antics of the global weather system. As developers, we build software systems that are part of an enterprise information system that is part of a business (system) that, in turn, is part of a supply chain (system) and the global economic system.

IT organizations today are tasked with a variety of development projects ranging from new Web-based applications to business-to-business integration (B2Bi). In all of these projects, integration of existing systems plays an important role. Traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) has delivered on connecting applications together, but it has failed in other major requirements for IT development, namely: cost (development and maintenance), time to market, flexibility, extensibility, reusability, and return on investment (ROI).

The aim of requirements reuse is to save time and effort and build better relationships by avoiding the duplication of work. Requirements reuse is the ability to benefit from requirements knowledge that has already been captured. This does not mean that all requirements knowledge must be formally defined in exactly the same way.

Companies today are in the midst of three business revolutions that are simultaneously converging and driving major environmental and organizational changes in most industries: globalization, new and emerging technologies, and the Internet.

Instant messaging (IM) has rapidly moved from an Internet fad to the boardroom -- or nearly so. Over the past few years, corporate use of IM has exploded, with estimates suggesting that nearly 30% of IM daily traffic of the large service providers -- AOL, MSN, and Yahoo -- is related to corporate use. Mounting evidence, including a recent Cutter survey, corroborates these findings.

Historically, technology has always had a major impact on how businesses do business. The invention of the telegraph 150 years ago revolutionized how organizations communicated. It also made it possible for organizations to grow larger than had been possible before, coordinate over greater geographical spaces, and react faster.

Enterprise portals, though variously defined, are now achieving importance as a central integration point for the diverse information sources available in networked enterprise environments. Despite recent media focus, and some prominent attempts to fix a definition, enterprise portals have actually existed since the first intranets based on early Web technologies were placed on corporate networks.

Software projects, like construction projects in the building industry, come in various sizes. Consider the following examples from the construction industry:

Productivity benchmarking means comparing the productivity of your projects with the productivity of other similar projects. Productivity is an important measure of the performance of software projects in a portfolio. It is defined as the ratio of output to input. In software, this translates to the ratio of effort to develop a system over the size of the system.

Despite the billions of dollars spent on technology, not much money is spent on how major technology decisions get made. Choosing technologies is not unlike choosing stocks; there are many to choose from, and you can't make the right call all of the time. In an up market, almost all stock choices look like good ones; in a down market, it's hard to find any good ones.

Caught in the frenetic rise of the dot-com phenomenon and following hot on the heels of Y2K, IT departments find themselves drowning in a sea of spaghetti logic and a Gordian knot of networked applications and legacy systems. The design of these IT applications has been tactical and not strategic. Few, if any, applications were designed in anticipation of the business processes they serve.

Personalization is often considered a tool for customizing Web sites, but it is important to understand that the techniques of personalization go far beyond Web sites. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that within a relatively brief period of time -- perhaps as little as a decade -- all human/computer interactions will be intensely personalized.

If you don't know where you are going, any road will do.

-- Anonymous

The accompanying Executive Report provides practical advice on how to prepare your organization to take advantage of future changes in software. The software industry has been and will continue to be buffeted by fads and hyped information in addition to transformative technology.

Developing business intelligence (BI) decision-support applications is quite different than developing operational systems or even traditional decision-support systems. BI projects must deal with new tasks, technologies, tools, database designs, and integration requirements.

For corporate IT departments, pressure to cut costs and improve performance has never been greater. In most IT shops, development and support of internally developed systems account for at least half of all costs, while new projects have long wait and delivery times. The most immediate pressure is to reduce these delivery times and, if possible, the associated costs.