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).

In the last Executive Update, I reported that Cutter Consortium recently conducted a survey of more than 170 companies from around the world.1 In this Update, I'll continue to draw from this survey data to consider company attitudes toward the Object Management Group's (OMG) services.

"The business plans we're developing now will need a big increase in responsiveness from the IT group."

I was sitting in the CEO's office in a midsized brokerage in New York City; the CEO had just said that IT productivity was crucial for his company's future.

"How big is 'big'?" I asked.

"Tenfold," said the CEO.

British Petroleum (BP -- London, UK) has been judged Europe's top knowledge-based enterprise. The 2001 European awards were given as a result of a benchmarking survey and study conducted by the Know Network.

The immortal words "The Web changes everything" are never more appropriately applied than in the present era of knowledge-, content-, and business intelligence (BI)-based portal and Web services for globalization. In Part I of this series, we talk about why and how nearly all US companies are affected by, and have substantial new opportunities in, global markets.

"An army marches on its belly." In this Executive Update, Napoleon's motivational maxim will guide us as we continue our look at the issues involving project management husbandry, drawing on data from Cutter Consortium surveys. (See Executive Updates Vol. 2, No. 21; Vol. 2, No. 22; and Vol. 3, No.

Agile development is raising eyebrows all across the world of software development. Yet agile methodologies are here to stay. Why? Because they have correctly exposed and provided viable solutions to the shortcomings of an increasingly heavyweight mindset that has, in recent years, ruled software development.

Say you're the vice president of IT in a major corporation, and your customers are looking for consistently high-performance, continuous improvement, and state-of-the-art technical solutions that satisfy their ever-changing business.

As a project manager, I adhere to J.R.R. Tolkien's advice on risk management: "It doesn't do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him." Dragons come in all sizes and attitudes. Some dragons are small and inconsequential to the safety of the village. Others are mean and nasty and leave nothing but fire and destruction in their wake. Project management has a lot to do with dragon management.

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." In this month's Executive Update, Oscar Wilde's adage will be our guide as we continue our look at the issues involving project management husbandry, drawing on data from Cutter Consortium's surveys. (See e-Project Management -- now known as Agile Project Management -- Executive Updates Vol. 2, Nos.

Like IT outsourcing in the past decade, companies today are increasingly outsourcing business processes such as payroll, training, benefits administration, billing, logistics, and human resources. Both IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) are independent of the economic cycle -- companies outsource in bad times to reduce costs, and they outsource in good times to access new markets, compete more successfully, and grow.

As we move forward in the 21st century, the landscape for delivering technical solutions to business continues to change, and the concept of outsourcing IT products and services continues to gain momentum. In fact, more companies are using outsourcing than ever before. Traditional IT outsourcing -- such as product development, application support, and staff augmentation -- is now just another way of doing business.

Table 1 -- Quality criteria used by survey respondents to evaluate and select service providers. (Respondents able to choose more than one category.)

With the recent acceleration of the economic downfall of several industries, the business community is entering an untested playground mined with all sorts of unpredictable threats.

Editor's note: Assertion 57 from the Cutter Business Technology Council states: "Every server on the Internet is attacked every day by hackers or hacker agent software.

The reason why enterprises pursue systematic knowledge management (KM) is clear: they wish to make people -- and the whole enterprise -- act intelligently to operate more effectively and better satisfy their stakeholders. However, the practical issue of how to approach introducing or expanding the KM practice is complex.

September 11 changed many things. Our personal lives have changed as much -- if not more -- than our professional lives. Some years ago, I had to beg for more money to enhance a security infrastructure. Why should we spend so much money on a "low-probability event?" I was asked. Do we really need such a large off-site contingency facility? How will we pay for all this stuff? Today, it would be easy.

Cutter Consortium has recently conducted a survey of more than 170 companies worldwide1 for its Distributed Enterprise Architecture Advisory Service. This Executive Update -- the first in a series based on these survey results -- focuses on a rather dramatic finding about the Object Management Group (OMG) as it relates to the plans of the companies in this survey.

In a recent Executive Update, I reported on a Cutter Consortium survey of 170 companies from around the world1 (see Executive Update, Vol. 5, No. 1). Just over 40% of the companies are involved in software development or services, while the rest come from a cross-section of industries.

The importance of data quality for data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) has received considerable attention in the industry. But what are companies actually doing to ensure the quality of their data for data warehousing and BI initiatives?

In the 1950s, as the interstate highway system was being constructed, who could have predicted the rise of suburban shopping malls 20 years later? In the wake of the September 11 attacks, some second- and third-order effects are already coming into focus.

Editor's note: This is the third Update in a three-part series. The first two appeared previously as Business-IT Strategies Executive Update Vol. 4, No. 20 and Vol. 4, No. 22.

IT shops generally have treated software development as an art rather than a science. After a brief interest in the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM), most IT shops have reverted back to application development as usual. Unfortunately, if a firm's e-business applications fail, it can have disastrous consequences.

Those who have been in computing long enough know that major technologies don't disappear. They are popular for a while, then less popular, and then more popular again. At each new wave, the names change, and the practices are more refined.