Extreme Programming (XP) is a discipline of software development based on values of simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage. XP is one of the so-called agile software methods, and probably the one with the most mindshare today. Other agile methods include Crystal, Adaptive Software Development, and Scrum. Compared to the others, XP is more closely focused with regard to specific planning and development practices, which in turn help select the projects that can use XP effectively.

Do you know what your company's strategies, goals, and objectives are? If so, you are already on the road toward alignment. Do your decisions, actions, and daily efforts promote these goals? If so, congratulations -- you are skilled at maintaining alignment.

The collected effectiveness of people at all levels of the enterprise "rolls up" into the performance of the enterprise itself. Improved business performance results from the improved effectiveness of people.

Software development is an international activity with parts of development organizations dispersed in distant locations. But after the events of September 11, many wonder whether this trend will continue. Will changes in global relationships and travel behavior affect the way software is being developed?

The accompanying Executive Report presents the case for a more holistic, enterprise-wide approach to IT testing, contained within an envelope of business risk management.

Business and IT organizations often express themselves in very different ways. To create information management systems that serve the needs of complex, nontrivial and rapidly changing businesses, effective communication is imperative. To communicate effectively, a small set of shared, clearly defined concepts and constructs is essential.

The strategic significance of information technology demands that organizations adopt a new IT mindset. It is a mindset around IT concepts, IT relevance, and IT ownership that permeates organizations and predetermines their responses to IT-based threats and opportunities. The new IT mindset engenders a new viewpoint on information technology as a business resource and leads to optimal IT investments.

In just about any industry, change is inevitable, and the pace of change is accelerating. But an established base of increasingly complex and interdependent systems is like a ball and chain, slowing companies down as they struggle to keep up with the change.

Within any industry, companies are guided by the same business directives as well as by the same laws and regulations. Therefore, at any company, the business processes that guide both tactical and strategic operations are expected to be invoked in well-understood business scenarios. However, despite operating under the same regulations, companies have wildly varying degrees of success.

Projects are an integral part of business. In this fast-paced, ever-changing business world, doing projects well is crucial. To clarify what I mean by "project" in the accompanying Executive Report: a project is a planned set of actions taken to improve a business process or to implement a new business process.

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).

The Object Management Group (OMG) announced its new Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in March of this year. Recognizing that middleware standards proliferated in the 1990s, and seeking to widen its appeal to all those involved in designing robust distributed systems, the group is extending its original Object Management Architecture.

A purported 60%-70% of business intelligence (BI) applications fail. The root causes for these failures are not related to the technology but to organizational, cultural, and infrastructure issues.

Over the past decades, organ-izations have adopted some unsound habits, which have produced disparate silo decision support systems with a great number of impairments.

Customer relationship management (CRM) can be found among the most important business movements of the past 10 years. CRM is not entirely new, since its roots are in customer satisfaction. However, CRM moves beyond simply measuring happy customers; it strives to gain more information and knowledge about the customer and to use that information effectively to benefit both the customer and the business.

It's often the case that what we have come to accept as best practices need to be periodically reviewed against industry experience. Outsourcing -- though acceptance is growing, and there are many instances of success -- is still in its infancy. Many of the techniques that are used for outsourcing procurement have been imported from other procurement systems.

Globalization has erased the boundaries of night and day, expanded the languages in which we do business, and provided us with more opportunities for new business and competition. Education breeds new ideas and disciplines that are continuously adopted by business, expanding the capabilities of every person and eliminating the ancient concept that only a select few are fit to lead.

Web services will become an important element of the future generation of distributed and e-business systems.

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.

When you base a project plan on the requirements, you gain many advantages. You put yourself in a powerful position because the map (the plan) matches the terrain (the real requirements).

A large proportion of software project cost is spent on rework. Rework is the effort expended on finding and fixing defects that were introduced earlier. A defect is introduced because of a misunderstood customer need or a programmer who made a mistake.

Experts estimate the typical manager spends four-fifths of the day communicating with others.1 The question is, are the people talking with each other or at each other? More and more, vendors and businesses are promoting collaboration, but collaboration is a word used to mean many things in business today.

Making components work means making them do what has been promised over the past several years. The idea was that by reusing components, development would be much faster, and timeliness and efficiency goals would be met. These are still pressing goals for IT organizations. But components haven't worked, and reuse claims are treated with cynicism.

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.

Most companies today demonstrate a considerable gap between the goals of IT and those of the business -- and I believe the gap is growing. For example, the executive team of one of our clients hired us to solve its IT governance crisis. Another client is struggling because its business units are acting at cross purposes with its IT service units.

Microsoft's .NET 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.