This Executive Report provides an overview of a mission-critical Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) project: the creation of a system to provide banking services to corporate customers over the Internet.

Application service providers (ASPs) are a new application-sourcing option spawned by the convergence of traditional outsourcing and the Internet. ASPs provide a "rent-an-app" service to their customers. The ASP hosts leading software applications and rents them to customers who use the Internet (or other network) to access the applications.

Business performance depends on the appropriateness of the business model adopted by organizations and on how effectively their IT infrastructure supports this model. Every day, companies are faced with the imperative need to align IT to their fast-changing business needs. The rapid technological developments in the IT arena also bring into question current business models.

Complexity is all around us.

Preparing for an outsourcing engagement takes a great deal of time and effort, as well as a commitment to doing things right. These preparatory activities will culminate in a set of contracts and documents that memorialize the understanding of the parties and the terms of their agreement.

The demands of the new economy present new requirements for the IT organization. It is no longer sufficient to focus only on keeping the networks running and reacting to business requests with new applications. Businesses now require that the IT organization meet the additional requirements for:

Enterprise application integration (EAI) describes a new category of software products that allows the unification and reuse of existing IT assets, facilitating their integration into a cohesive corporate system framework. This Executive Report predicts that most IT organizations will create an EAI agenda in the near future.

The accompanying Executive Report discusses an emerging IT function we refer to as global IT sourcing, along with the steps, processes, and tools needed to build such a corporate IT function. The authors spent the past two years building such an organization for a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company.

The accompanying Executive Report discusses the important topic of business-IT alignment in the e-business realm. It examines the Internet's unsurpassed ability to exchange information as well as its deconstructive effect on business as we know it. The Executive Report also explores how these same forces affect IT organizations and the paths by which IT can reconstruct itself.

Centralizing a corporation was once consider

The accompanying Executive Report begins with an outsourcing case study and follows with a look toward the future of outsourcing. The case study starts with a history of the organization: Amtrak. US Congress passed the Rail Passenger Service Act in 1970, creating the National Passenger Railroad Corporation (Amtrak) to provide intercity rail passenger service in the US.

The evaluation of cutting-edge technologies can be a difficult task in the face of the hype that naturally accompanies their evolution. XML is no different from other technologies in this respect. If you believe the hype, XML obviates the need for Java, brings Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) into the Internet era, replaces the relational database, and revolutionizes the development of Web sites.

The key to a successful outsourcing project lies in the buyer's ability to negotiate an effective contract and manage a working relationship that will change and evolve over the life of the project. The goal of the accompanying Executive Report is to start you thinking about strategies you can employ in the negotiating process to ensure a successful working relationship with your outsourcing vendor.

The emergence of a knowledge economy has altered the nature of work, the fate of companies, and the fate of nations.-- Nuala Beck, 1999

Poorly integrated information architectures are destabilizing the business units that rely on them. Most IT environments evolved under isolated scenarios in which few systems were functionally integrated. Over the years, we have experienced a massive proliferation of redundant, inconsistent data and system functionality.

To feel confident about using a technology for critical applications, certain questions must be answered satisfactorily: Is this technology succeeding in production elsewhere? Is there enough support for developing applications? Are enough people committed to the success of this technology? Are vendors providing the necessary tools to get the job done?

Those who make, apply, and support information technology cannot adequately respond to the pace of technology change. Programmers proficient in C and PowerBuilder wonder how their skills got devalued so fast.

In 1997, IMA, a well-known independent software vendor of large-scale, high-volume customer interaction center (call center) applications, made a conscious decision to re-architect its entire software line and its software development organization around component technology and open distributed computing.

This Executive Report explores the circumstances that make outsourcing a viable and sensible option for an IT organization.

Some of you may remember artificial intelligence (AI) as the darling technology of the 1970s and 1980s. You may also remember the early decision support systems (DSSs) that populated vertical industries in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of these applications were fueled by complex analytical methodologies such as Bayesian statistical models and statistical optimization algorithms.

Software robustness is a problem that everybody cares about but that few people address in their products. The average software project has several weeks devoted to testing, mostly in the weeks before deployment. Of course, most software ends up behind schedule and over budget, and testing is the first thing to be reduced or cut.

To survive the pace of business and technology change that your organization is experiencing in today's world, you need a repeatable requirements management methodology. You also need a methodology that provides insight into project requirements before you spend serious money. The requirements management methodology described briefly in this Executive Summary may fulfill that need.

Although the concept of components is not new, technology has finally enabled the pragmatic use of components for enterprise systems. Components, which represent a fundamental change in how development teams build software, allow developers to build software from robust, well-defined elements.

In this issue of the Executive Report, we discuss how the good things we've learned about systems requirements management can be extended to all kinds of requirements management.

This is the fourth installment in a series of reports by Michael Guttman and Jason Matthews that focuses on migrating to enterprise component computing. In the first Executive Report in the series (Vol. 1, No. 1), they began describing the process and the best practices that companies routinely follow to make successful transitions.