Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a corporate strategy that is gaining in popularity.

How much are you spending on technology? Who pays for what? How do you determine funding responsibilities? And how do you determine how to pay for infrastructure, applications, R&D, and ongoing technology management? These are huge issues -- especially when you consider that the US spends more than one trillion dollars a year on hardware, software, and services. Yes -- a trillion dollars!

How many of us wrestle with the question "who should report to whom?" several times a year? Have your efforts to "reorganize" the business-technology relationship been proactive or reactive? Often, because some influential people complain about the relationship, things change. But reactive changes usually don't last long.

Cutter Business Technology Council Fellow Tim Lister's recent Council Opinion (Vol. 3, No. 8) discusses the continuous partial attention (CPA) phenomenon first described by Linda Stone (then of Microsoft) in a January 2001 New York Times article.

Editor's note: This discussion has been adapted from Bennatan's texts Software Project Management: A Practitioner's Approach (McGraw-Hill, 1992) and On Time Within Budget: Software Project Management Practices and Techniques, now in its third edition (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).

Imagine that you were going to build an IT outsourcing process from the ground up -- that is, you didn't have to deal with existing constraints or "the way we've always done it around here." How would you do it? What capabilities would be critical to maintain a high degree of outsourcing success and ongoing business customer satisfaction?

As outsourcing has evolved over the past 10 years, many new trends have developed. Client companies have become more adept at maximizing the value received through outsourcing using a number of methods.

Enterprise architecture means very different things to different people. Some think of it as one thing, while others view it as a set of different architectures or perspectives. In recent years, the Zachman framework has become an increasingly popular way of defining the breadth and scope of an enterprise architecture.

You can tell a lot about a company by the discipline it practices. Some companies perform due diligence, while others make decisions based on what the brother-in-law thinks. There are also consultants who will tell you how to think -- for a price, of course.

If there is one group of people within your IT department that truly deserves respect, it is the one that performs the job of legacy data integration. Legacy data integration is a critical component of your enterprise application integration (EAI) efforts -- one that your organization must master if it is to succeed.

Every large company has hundreds of applications that were developed to solve one problem and are being used today for vastly different purposes. There's the accounting system that was designed to update customer accounts and generate statements that's now being used to provide online customers with information about their account balances.