"My hat's in the ring. The fight is on, and I'm stripped to the buff." The ringing words of Teddy Roosevelt set the theme for this and future Executive Updates. In this update, we begin our look at the issues involving the great agile versus heavy methodology fray, drawing on data from Cutter Consortium's ongoing surveys.

In this month's Executive Update, we continue our look at the issues surrounding the debate over agile versus heavy methodologies, drawing on data from Cutter Consortium's ongoing surveys.

A year ago, Cutter Consortium surveyed IT executives and managers about the nature of their IT outsourcing. Were they using sole source arrangements or engaging multiple service providers? How many vendors did they involve? An overwhelming 83% of respondents used more than one external service provider. In fact, most used three or more.

People -- especially skilled, knowledgeable people -- are in great demand today. Organizations are recognizing that fact and trying to react. As a result, concepts like human capital are increasingly popular. Recently, the Cutter Business Technology Council issued an Opinion authored by Tom DeMarco and Peter O'Farrell ( Vol. 2, No.

Editor's note: A recent assertion from the Cutter Business Technology Council states, "Loss of core competencies will continue. Outsourcing of core competencies will continue and will continue to fail." This assertion will be debated in an upcoming Council Opinion.

We're in a period of belt-tightening -- cutting expenses, reducing staff, and decreasing the number of projects we're working on. Managing our project portfolios is one of the hardest problems in IT, and one of the most necessary, because there are always more possible projects than there are people and time to do them.

Respondents to Cutter Consortium's latest Business-IT Strategies Survey, which focuses on e-business and IT alignment, tend to take a formal approach to IT in general and e-business in particular. This is reflected in the fact that 81% of respondents have a formal IT strategy, and 57% have a formal e-business strategy.

E-business benefits fall into three categories: revenue enhancement, cost savings, and intangibles. Revenue enhancement comes from greater sales, whether through e-commerce on the Web or brochureware that attracts more customers to traditional channels. Cost savings are generated by improved efficiency, such as cost cutting or simply getting a bigger bang for the same buck.

One can hardly read a computer magazine these days without encountering at least one article and a half-dozen advertisements touting the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

This is the second part of our analysis of Cutter Consortium survey data measuring corporate customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives. The findings in this analysis (as well as the preceding) are based on answers provided by 159 survey participants.

One of the most interesting facets of business intelligence these days is data mining, which allows analysts and business professionals to dig deep into their organization's data to find patterns and infer rules. These patterns and rules can then be used to guide business users in making decisions and forecasting the effect of those decisions.

Ten years ago, I was invited to join a panel of software engineering protagonists at Motorola. At our first meeting with then-CEO George Fisher, we drafted a list of goals for the panel. One of them was 10X cycle-time reduction, a central goal then and still today.

An extreme project looks like this:

In previous Executive Updates, we've looked at IT executives' motivations for outsourcing and the types of models they plan to use (application service providers [ASPs], business process outsourcing [BPO], etc.). That has provided an understanding of the "whys" and the "hows" of outsourcing but not the "whats." Exactly what are IT organizations outsourcing?

Editor's note: Assertion #38 from the Cutter Technology Council states, "Success of e-business will depend on its awareness of, support for, and facilitation of conversations between different communities (customers, employees, etc.)." This assertion will be debated in an upcoming Council Opinion.

Editor's note: A recent assertion from the Cutter Business Technology Council states, "Groupware will come into its own (or at least the need for it). This includes shared whiteboards, document control over the extranet, effective cross-organizational to-do lists, e-mail improvements, and improved intranets."

Faster, better, cheaper. Whether you're developing and supporting software applications internally or externally, this continues to be the mantra for IT managers and their business partners. In fact, many corporations have turned to outsourcing in an attempt to ease the constant pressure of achieving these objectives.

A number of psychology studies have shown that human beings have roughly seven "slots" in their brains. These slots contain your ideas and personal priorities -- related to work, family, health, etc. -- at any point in time Basically, this represents whatever thoughts you're juggling. Anything that doesn't make it into those slots gets shelved into memory, to be triggered later by an event or an assistant (digital or human).

A common question asked within the IT industry is "How can we successfully develop software?" One answer is to adopt and follow an appropriate software process -- also referred to as a software methodology -- to guide your development efforts.

In a recent Cutter Business Technology Council Opinion, I wrote the following:

"Software functionality and other services traditionally provided by internal IT departments will be increasingly delivered 'over the Net' via supply chains composed of multiple external service providers.

E-learning seems to be the newest solution for all that ails business training programs, and it's inevitable that IT be challenged to adopt an approach to learning that leverages technology. Creating a strategy for e-learning is confusing, though, because it can take so many different forms. Walk through a vendor exhibit area at any training conference and it seems every vendor is selling an e-learning product.

We've talked a lot about how e-business is different. New technologies, 24/7 availability, worldwide access, and faster time to market are all ways that the e-business world is different. Most of these changes are concrete and therefore obvious. But e-business is different in intangible ways, too.

Recently, members of the Cutter Research Business Technology Trends Group (a focus group of IT managers) were asked to complete a study on the future of their mobile workforces. For this study, mobile professionals were defined as workers who are trying to access corporate information away from a physical corporate location.

Increasingly, companies are turning to component-based development to create new applications. A few years ago, most companies were still doing object and component development in special groups and applying the techniques to carefully selected tasks. However, since the late 1990s, with the rise of the Internet and Java, component-based techniques have pretty much swept away the competition.