After countless hours of research, reading articles, and attending conferences, you are ready to tackle a data warehousing/business intelligence (BI) project and finally see the 401% return on investment everyone else seems to be getting. You get the funding, only to realize the real work lay ahead of you -- purchasing software, hardware, and middleware.

In this Executive Update, we continue our look at the issues involved in the agile versus heavy methodology fray, drawing on data from Cutter Consortium's ongoing surveys.

The following article by Tom DeMarco was orginally published in Cutter Information Corp.'s American Programmer (now Cutter IT Journal) and later included in Mr. DeMarco's book, Why Does Software Cost So Much (and Other Puzzles of the Information Age) (Dorset House, 1995).

Since companies today are faced with intense global competition for price, quality, and service, CIOs and other IT managers are confronted with unprecedented pressures. IT managers are expected to deliver quality IT services and systems in an environment of rapid business and technology change, short delivery cycles, and ever-changing business requirements.

Advances in wireless networks and positioning technology have given us the ability to determine the exact location of a mobile device. The possibilities and implications of this fact are enormous. Think about it: a person, piece of equipment, or valuable shipment can always be found and tracked. We can know where they are, how best to direct them to where they should be, and can determine when they will arrive.

For decades, technologists have been predicting the replacement of traditional teaching with more sophisticated, less people-intensive approaches. Starting with videotapes in the 1970s to the current interest in distance learning via the Internet, vendors and organizations have sought to find a less expensive, less time- and travel-consuming method for training people.

Phil Knight -- of Nike's oft quoted public utterance, "This is what I get for $400 million?" -- has become the poster child for highlighting the difficulty of implementing supply chain technologies.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) has emerged as the middleware approach of choice for companies that want to create distributed applications (Web services) on the Internet. By itself, XML provides a message format. In the past year, XML has been supplemented by a variety of protocols that extend its power. XML's tag description facility has been extended with XML script to make it easier to describe complex data formats. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) has been widely adopted to provide a transport mechanism.

Agent technology is currently one of the most active and vibrant areas of IT research and development. After many years, the word agent has become fashionable because the state of the technology seems to fit several important applications, including business process management, manufacturing, information retrieval, user assistants, and even entertainment.

Cutter Consortium has been conducting a survey to determine whether companies are undertaking e-business projects and, if so, how they are architecting these projects. This is the first in a series of Executive Updates in which we will report on these findings.

Data complexity and quality, when underestimated, have derailed more than one business process reengineering (BPR), enterprise resource planning, or data warehousing project.

Cutter Consortium: We understand you've been working with a client on an integration project. Can you describe it?

In every facet of life the question of who you can trust surfaces, though the answer often eludes us. In the information security game, we try to create mechanisms to help us answer this question, and our reputation as well as professional pride are tied up with getting it right. But is that possible?

Sustainable competitive advantage usually results from a company learning how to create its product or service more efficiently than its competitors or charging a premium because the company's product is widely believed to be superior. Top managers seek to develop strategies that will provide their companies with a secure competitive advantage.

In this Executive Update, one in a series on Extensible Markup Language (XML), we'll focus on XML languages. One key to understanding the value of XML is recognizing that XML is a metalanguage -- it allows the creation of tailored languages that describe data that can be passed from one user or application to another.

Meeting the challenges of today's business world essentially requires reinventing a company's approach to conducting business. To do this, companies must focus on increased collaboration between people and organizational entities -- that is,people-centric knowledge management.

Cutter Consortium continues to survey companies about their customer relationship management (CRM) practices. In this Executive Update, we discuss findings on a number of CRM issues, including:

A large e-business database vendor had to deliver a Java application to a key customer within 6 months and support it for at least another 18. Joe Mellow, the project manager, estimated that 145 new classes would have to be developed to deliver the functionality. He also knew that his budget was meager, and the expected revenue from this engagement was barely sufficient to cover his development and support costs.

The dreaded dragon of traditional project management is alive and well and now stalking e-projects. "Bring it in on time, on scope, and on budget" continues to be the cry of CIOs and other senior management as they seek to get projects under control and avoid unpleasant surprises.

As part of Cutter Consortium's ongoing survey of IT executives and managers on the nature of their IT outsourcing, we asked whether companies had transferred responsibility for a system from one service provider to another. A fairly large number (59%) had not, indicating that there is not a high level of experience in this area (see Figure 1).

Cutter Consortium's Business Technology Trends and Impacts Advisory Service's Assertion #47 states:

Nothing in life is perfect, although software development practitioners persist in seeking the elusive (and presumably mythical) silver bullet. Experience shows that as soon as one stubborn obstacle is overcome, another generally looms into sight behind it.

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.

There's no shortage of Extensible Markup Language (XML) hype these days, but it's nevertheless a very new standard. In most cases, when people talk about XML, they are assuming it can do things that are well beyond the basic XML standard issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). I've argued that there are really four issues to consider: