If information technologies are the engines of the Information Age, data is the fuel. Unfortunately, the fuel -- specifically the quality of the fuel, has received far less attention than the engines. Most people, when they think about it for even a few minutes, intuitively realize that the quality of the data is lagging far behind the technologies.

In today's fast-paced, fiercely competitive world of commercial new-product development, speed and flexibility are essential. Companies are increasingly realizing that the old, sequential approach to developing new products simply won't get the job done.1

IT professionals are constantly feeling pressure to become better aligned with the business areas they support. Far too little time is spent explaining why alignment is important and how to go about becoming better aligned. The accompanying Executive Report aims to fill these voids and give IT professionals practical advice for seeking and attaining alignment with the business of their company.

In just a few short years, the Extensible Markup Language (XML), a simple data description language, has significantly changed how we think about data and communicate across the Internet. Content providers are looking to XML as a flexible data storage medium for delivering specialized content to browsers and handheld wireless computing devices.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications can do wonders for replacing a variety of legacy and other disparate information systems strung out across the enterprise. The same cannot be said of their decision support, data warehousing, and business intelligence (BI) capabilities.

The practice of software design has evolved in interesting ways over the past 30 years, along with the complexity and the capabilities of computer software itself. In many ways, this evolution takes the form of a pendulum swinging: from very little formal software design in the beginning to the excessively detailed and documented design of software engineering in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Companies outsource for many reasons in today's competitive economy. Many are seeking speed and agility to respond to the marketplace. Others seek faster IT at lower costs or access to IT core competencies of an alliance partner, freeing them to focus on their own.

Business-IT alignment is critical to the near-term profitability and long-term success of your enterprise. Business-IT alignment is achieved when business requirements, strategy, infrastructure, and processes are synchronized with each other and with IT infrastructure, data, systems, and processes.

By any reasonable measure, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a success. Yet it continues to be underestimated, belittled, or completely ignored. Some critics deride the idea of distributed object computing.

The accompanying Executive Report reviews the concepts, product categories, features, and benefits of enterprise portals -- also called corporate portals or enterprise information portals (we use the term enterprise portal in this report). These three equivalent terms are defined as:

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....

The accompanying Executive Report discusses the reasons for the high failure rates of customer relationship management (CRM) system implementations. It also recommends an approach to developing and implementing a customer-focused strategy that increases the chances of success.

There's little doubt about the impact of the Internet in the past decade; it has been profound, forever changing the way people use computers, access information, and do business. Not as widely recognized is the impact the Internet has had on software development and IT systems. The impact on software professionals, practices, and technology is just as profound.

Business intelligence (BI) is the set of processes and data structures used to understand a company's business environment and support strategic analysis and decisionmaking. The accompanying Executive Report describes the business value that BI capabilities provide, the architecture needed to support the environment, and a sound approach for building and managing it.

For a software development or maintenance manager, a typical day involves making a seemingly endless string of decisions. But what is a good decision? One that:

Traditional outsourcing was usually tactical and often had little to do with strategic alignment of the business. Today, the role of external service providers has matured into a strategic enabler, rather than just a cost-cutting tactic.

Enterprise systems are very large computer systems that promise to replace major chunks of a company's applications infrastructure with an off-the-shelf, third-party package. In the early- to mid-1990s, they were primarily enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that focused on integrating the back-office, transaction-based subsystems required to run modern companies.

The goal of the accompanying Executive Report is to introduce two technologies for securing your company's networks: firewalls and virtual private networks (VPNs).

During life's more rational moments, no software development executive will ever deny that customer satisfaction is an important goal to achieve. The question is, in the midst of quickly evolving technologies, escalating customer expectations, and increasing competitive pressures, how do you achieve it?

Have you ever wondered if you could find out how companies are really doing with outsourcing? To answer that question, we created a list of we-always-wanted-to-know questions and conducted individual, face-to-face interviews with a select list of people who are involved in outsourcing.

The question is not if, but when. Don't question if you will need a computer security strategy; determine when the situation will arise showing you need one. Hackers, criminals, naive users, accidents, tired employees, acts of nature -- all of these can cause serious damage to IT systems and data. Failing to address security can lead to unnecessary risk and expense.

The Internet is the core technology that drives today's e-business processes. On that foundation sits the Web, one of the most disruptive technologies in the history of business computing. Not more than five or six years ago, businesses looked at the Web with fear and mistrust; after all, it was a technology that connected individuals directly to institutions at any time of the day from any place on earth.

Project management is arguably the single greatest challenge facing e-projects today.

With nearly US $1 trillion being spent each year on IT worldwide, the question is no longer whether to outsource, but how to harness IT supplier capabilities, ensure contracts go well, and remain flexible in case relationships go awry. In short, executives want to better manage IT suppliers.

The idea of artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for a long time. Its roots are in the world of mathematics, yet AI also has a long history in the field of computer science. AI (the artificial creation of all aspects of life) has been seen as a daring concept but, in reality, AI is used routinely today by more people than ever before.