It's no secret that insurance companies are big IT spenders. Larger insurers have been consistently spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year on software alone. For some time, insurers have been focusing the vast majority of their technology spending in two areas: computing infrastructure and business process automation.

Software estimation has been a tough beast to control ever since the early days of programming. Some may say that we have succumbed to the dragon. During the 1980s and 1990s, there were many infamous stories about software projects running out of control and ultimately being abandoned, due to significant cost and time overruns [1].

During Cutter Consortium's annual surveys on outsourcing in 2001 and 2002, survey recipients were asked if and how they were using the Internet to manage their outsourcing relationships. The results are in, and they indicate that employing the Internet for the various aspects of outsourcing is still in somewhat of a growth mode.

In Part I of this Executive Update (Vol. 5, No. 4), we looked at the investments we're all making in applications infrastructure, specifically, object-oriented (OO) databases, enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, content management platforms, portals, data warehouses, and data mining tools.

A lot of us are finally very concerned about security. We've already documented this increased awareness and commitment to just about all aspects of security (see Business-IT Strategies Executive Update, Vol. 5, No. 2). But what technologies are we looking at? Which ones should we buy? Which ones are likely to become "standard"?

A Web service is a programmable entity that provides a particular element of functionality, such as application logic, and is accessible to any number of potentially disparate systems through the use of Internet standards, such as XML and HTTP.

As the next revolutionary advancement of the Internet, Web services will become the fundamental structure that links together all computing devices.

The idea of the Semantic Web first became popular with the publication of an article by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila in the May 2001 issue of Scientific American (" The Semantic Web," www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html).

Yes -- it appears to be true. Companies are satisfied with their strategic choice of distributed software development (DSD). The tough challenges of DSD bear sweet fruit at the end of the road -- at least that is what many development organizations have indicated in a recent Cutter Consortium survey on DSD.

Alternative development processes such as Extreme Programming (XP), Crystal Methodologies, Scrum, and feature-driven development have received an increasing amount of attention and press over the past two years. These Young Turk methodologies are often characterized by some of their more radical practices, such as pair programming, minimalist architecture, and test zealotry.

As most readers know, UML stands for the Unified Modeling Language, a modeling system and notation standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG) in 1997. An earlier version had been developed by three methodologists -- Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson -- who worked for Rational Software.

Wireless business intelligence (BI) consists of delivering data access and analysis to mobile corporate users of cell phones and other Web-enabled devices, including PDAs such as Palm, RIM, and Windows CE handheld platforms that are now popular among business professionals and other mobile workers.

In Part I of this two-part series (see Business Intelligence Executive Update, Vol. 2, No. 4), we built the business case for why right now may be the most opportune time for small to mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) to aggressively pursue international market entry and/or expansion opportunities and strategies. This is the definition of globalization.

The use of data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) for optimizing supply chain operations is receiving growing interest by the industry. Vendors and IT service providers have introduced new analytical supply chain products and services, and companies are discussing their experiences at conferences and trade shows.

Or Chicago? Or Boston? Or Moscow? This is called distributed software development (DSD), where parts of the development team are located at distant sites. The focus is on distance, and the problem is one of communication between the team members; this is what characterizes a DSD project.

A distributed software development (DSD) strategy is only suitable for very large projects: true or false? In DSD projects, you cannot mix software development with hardware development: true or false? Companies cannot apply DSD to all of their projects -- it is just too difficult to manage: true or false?

You have a lot invested in your outsourcing partnership. The strategic planning that led to your business decision to outsource was most likely driven by a desire to lower cost, reduce delivery times, or improve quality. Regardless of how you got there, you are now in a relationship that has business-critical objectives.

As the outsourcing business model becomes the norm, it seems to be a good time to pause and reflect on common observations and practices from the past several years. If you are new to the world of outsourcing, or if you are considering outsourcing for a department or function, we encourage you to learn from others' successes as well as their mistakes. Consider the guidelines in this Update to help turn chaos into calm.

Even before the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, international security industry analysts were becoming concerned that the rapid growth of hacker activity was showing signs of organized behavior.

Quite a few supply chain management (SCM) package implementation failures have grabbed the headlines over the past few years, from companies including Whirlpool, Nike, and Hershey. A major cause of these failures has been the difficulty in changing processes within the firm and across the supply chain.

Over the past few years, we have witnessed a widespread resurgence of interest in process-driven information technology and business management. This trend is being fueled by several factors:

Music to any company's ears is the promise to help it realize its goals and enable it to face the future with confidence. Taking that a step further, for the shareholder, this translates into improved share price and shareholder value.

There are lots of steps we're all taking to succeed in the 21st century. Now that the fear of a worldwide meltdown due to Y2K noncompliance is well behind us, we can turn to supply chain connectivity, customer relationship management, and business intelligence (BI).