There are two main requirements for the success of e-projects: alignment with business needs and rapid low-cost delivery. Both can be achieved through effective project management practices. On e-projects, alignment means achieving effective and rapid-response requirements management. Cost reduction implies proper mechanisms for planning and control, which ensure early visibility and near-optimal use of resources.

It's a ritual reminiscent of a peacock strutting its tail feathers. To woo potential clients, service providers parade their quality achievements and certifications in front of potential suitors, trying to convince them that on-time delivery is a foregone conclusion.

Outsourcing as a business option has increased dramatically in the past 10 years. US spending on outsourcing increased from US $9 billion in 1990 to $250 billion in 1999. 1 Cutter Consortium asked a panel of Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants -- Mike Epner, Ian Hayes, David Herron, and Wendell Jones -- to guide us through the outsourcing process.

It seems like you can't open a magazine without reading about the fast-growing software industry in India. Recent issues of Business Week, CIO, and even IEEE Software have all focused on the fortunes of India-based software organizations and their mounting challenge to US-based service providers.

The Cutter Technology Trends Council Assertion #39 states, "We will see a new class of applications that we don't even know how to characterize yet (e.g., Zaplets)." This assertion will be explored fully in a future Council Opinion; the purpose of this Executive Update is to provide information about the Zaplet technology.

During the meteoric rise of e-business, e-business hype grew right along with dot-com market valuations -- until the bubble burst in the spring of 2000. Since that time, the hype has dropped from the absolutely ridiculous ("e-business is changing the laws of economics") to the merely unrealistic ("e-business will change the world as we know it").

One rule of critical thinking, popularized by Ayn Rand, is to be aware of your premises and to check them regularly against reality. Cutter Consortium's ongoing Business-IT Strategies Survey helps us do this in the case of business-IT issues.

An enterprise portal provides a unified point of access to an enterprise's Internet and Web connections -- for business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-employee (B2E) connections. It includes all the software needed to create, enhance, customize, and manage these connections, along with the tools to integrate existing business functions and processes.

Cutter Consortium continues to survey selected companies on their business strategies and computing plans. The companies we survey are established corporations, not e-business startups.

Cutter Consortium continues to survey companies to ascertain data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) implementation trends. In a recent survey, we asked 130 companies a variety of questions pertaining to data quality in the data warehouse environment.

Project management frameworks are usually thought of as a structure for managing complex projects. Risk management is typically considered to be a part of the overall project management approach -- an exercise in which risks are identified, mitigation tactics are applied, and contingency plans are developed.

A new type of project has emerged in the last few years, one that results from the combination of two dominant global trends in the new economy -- accelerated change and the dominance of e-business models. Just as "managing by projects" is the natural response to change, e-projects are the response to that change within the e-conomy.

Two recent e-Project Management E-Mail Advisorsfrom Jim Highsmith (director of Cutter Consortium's e-Project Management practice area) and Lou Russell (a senior consultant on this and the Business-IT Strategies service) sparked commentary from subscribers and Cutter senior consultants. We present the original pieces and the responses here, including that of Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Ram Reddy.

In the first part of this Executive Update (" Using a Project Dashboard to Manage an Outsourced Portfolio: Part 1," December 2000, No. 2), we described how project dashboards can be used to monitor project and portfolio status.

The Internet economy challenges executives to rethink the notion of the traditional, vertically integrated firm in favor of a more flexible organization. The self-sufficient company is being replaced with interdependent organizations.

In the last couple of months, two of IBM's principal competitors in the mainframe business, Amdahl and Hitachi, both announced that they intend to withdraw from the market for large-scale mainframe computers.

The Cutter Technology Council's Assertion #22 reads: "Privacy will become one of the major constraints on the speed with which e-business replaces traditional business interactions." The purpose of this Executive Update is to consider whether there is evidence of this trend in industry today.

In a recent Cutter Business Technology Trends and Impacts Council Opinion (" Instant Messaging," Vol. 2, No. 1), I suggested that the wireless Web will be bigger than the wired Web and that this change will happen faster than the time frame in which the wired Web became prevalent. Recently, we conducted a survey to see how IT professionals view the wired world.

Editor's note: Assertion No.

Editor's note: Assertion No. 7 from the Cutter Technology Council states, "The principal IT overhaul in the next 10 years will be organizational rather than technical, specifically a move to leadership practices facilitating organizational adaptability."

Given the freedom and resources to do so, people will act to take advantage of opportunities and satisfy their own needs. In the economy, the most obvious example of this is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs start new businesses, bring new products to market, and incite competition. Entrepreneurs see an economic opportunity and act on it.

Throughout its short history, IT has focused on itself and avoided looking at how to better align with the customer.

When we last visited the phenomenon known as XML (Extensible Markup Language), the technology was showing great promise as a data-interchange format for legacy-to-Web strategies. That was in June 2000 (see " Business-to-Business E-Commerce Brings XML to the Forefront").

Trial lawyers usually get a call only after major IT projects (or other kinds of projects) turn into hideous train wrecks. They are shown the scene of the accident: the mangled cars and tangled tracks of what was once a promising project. They are asked, "What in the world happened to cause this much money to go down the drain?" And, "Oh, by the way, whose fault was it, and how much can you get us in court?"