Editor's note: A recent assertion from the Cutter Business Technology Council states, "Loss of core competencies will continue. Outsourcing of core competencies will continue and will continue to fail." This assertion will be debated in an upcoming Council Opinion.

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:

In the last Executive Update I wrote on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), I focused on core XML updates DOM and Schema. This month, I want to focus on broader architectural issues. I've already discussed the fact that XML can serve two functions: it can pass text between human users or pass data between software applications.

Most of the attention pertaining to application service providers (ASPs) has been focused on companies using them to outsource their transaction processing applications and services (Web hosting, human resources, payroll, processing, etc.). Very little discussion has taken place regarding the extent to which companies are embracing the ASP model for outsourcing their customer relationship management (CRM) operations.

"My hat's in the ring. The fight is on, and I'm stripped to the buff." The ringing words of Teddy Roosevelt set the theme for this and future Executive Updates. In this update, we begin our look at the issues involving the great agile versus heavy methodology fray, drawing on data from Cutter Consortium's ongoing surveys.

E-business benefits fall into three categories: revenue enhancement, cost savings, and intangibles. Revenue enhancement comes from greater sales, whether through e-commerce on the Web or brochureware that attracts more customers to traditional channels. Cost savings are generated by improved efficiency, such as cost cutting or simply getting a bigger bang for the same buck.

One can hardly read a computer magazine these days without encountering at least one article and a half-dozen advertisements touting the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

This is the second part of our analysis of Cutter Consortium survey data measuring corporate customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives. The findings in this analysis (as well as the preceding) are based on answers provided by 159 survey participants.

One of the most interesting facets of business intelligence these days is data mining, which allows analysts and business professionals to dig deep into their organization's data to find patterns and infer rules. These patterns and rules can then be used to guide business users in making decisions and forecasting the effect of those decisions.

Ten years ago, I was invited to join a panel of software engineering protagonists at Motorola. At our first meeting with then-CEO George Fisher, we drafted a list of goals for the panel. One of them was 10X cycle-time reduction, a central goal then and still today.

An extreme project looks like this:

In previous Executive Updates, we've looked at IT executives' motivations for outsourcing and the types of models they plan to use (application service providers [ASPs], business process outsourcing [BPO], etc.). That has provided an understanding of the "whys" and the "hows" of outsourcing but not the "whats." Exactly what are IT organizations outsourcing?

Editor's note: Assertion #38 from the Cutter Technology Council states, "Success of e-business will depend on its awareness of, support for, and facilitation of conversations between different communities (customers, employees, etc.)." This assertion will be debated in an upcoming Council Opinion.

Editor's note: A recent assertion from the Cutter Business Technology Council states, "Groupware will come into its own (or at least the need for it). This includes shared whiteboards, document control over the extranet, effective cross-organizational to-do lists, e-mail improvements, and improved intranets."

E-learning seems to be the newest solution for all that ails business training programs, and it's inevitable that IT be challenged to adopt an approach to learning that leverages technology. Creating a strategy for e-learning is confusing, though, because it can take so many different forms. Walk through a vendor exhibit area at any training conference and it seems every vendor is selling an e-learning product.

We've talked a lot about how e-business is different. New technologies, 24/7 availability, worldwide access, and faster time to market are all ways that the e-business world is different. Most of these changes are concrete and therefore obvious. But e-business is different in intangible ways, too.

Recently, members of the Cutter Research Business Technology Trends Group (a focus group of IT managers) were asked to complete a study on the future of their mobile workforces. For this study, mobile professionals were defined as workers who are trying to access corporate information away from a physical corporate location.

Increasingly, companies are turning to component-based development to create new applications. A few years ago, most companies were still doing object and component development in special groups and applying the techniques to carefully selected tasks. However, since the late 1990s, with the rise of the Internet and Java, component-based techniques have pretty much swept away the competition.

Agile modeling (AM), formerly known as extreme modeling (XM), describes a collection of values, principles, and practices for effective modeling of software systems. The approaches promoted by AM can be used to improve most software development projects, particularly those focused on the creation of business software, regardless of the software process that the project team has adopted.

I am currently the application architect on a project whose purpose is to accept service orders from Web clients and implement those orders by triggering workflows in back-end legacy systems. The exact details of the client or the application are unimportant. What's important is that this is a typical enterprise application integration (EAI) scenario -- using a Web client to invoke end-to-end transactions via a workflow middle layer that ultimately uses back-end resources to perform its work.

This past February, a war of words erupted between the shoe manufacturer Nike, Inc. and i2 Technologies, the software developer that provided Nike with a new demand-and-supply inventory system.

It seems as though you can hardly open a business or IT magazine without running across a vendor or company hyping customer relationship management (CRM). Unfortunately, opinions vary considerably concerning the real value of undertaking CRM initiatives. Opinions swing just as wildly as to what goals or trends are driving corporate CRM initiatives and what benefits organizations are hoping to gain from them. Moreover, depending on whom you talk to, companies are either enamored with their CRM initiatives or extremely disillusioned due to high failure rates.