Faster, better, cheaper. Whether you're developing and supporting software applications internally or externally, this continues to be the mantra for IT managers and their business partners. In fact, many corporations have turned to outsourcing in an attempt to ease the constant pressure of achieving these objectives.

A number of psychology studies have shown that human beings have roughly seven "slots" in their brains. These slots contain your ideas and personal priorities -- related to work, family, health, etc. -- at any point in time Basically, this represents whatever thoughts you're juggling. Anything that doesn't make it into those slots gets shelved into memory, to be triggered later by an event or an assistant (digital or human).

A common question asked within the IT industry is "How can we successfully develop software?" One answer is to adopt and follow an appropriate software process -- also referred to as a software methodology -- to guide your development efforts.

In a recent Cutter Business Technology Council Opinion, I wrote the following:

"Software functionality and other services traditionally provided by internal IT departments will be increasingly delivered 'over the Net' via supply chains composed of multiple external service providers.

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.

Whether to centralize or to decentralize is one of the perennial questions in IT. It never goes away; it just advances and recedes in an irregular cycle. Since this question is currently looming large in industry, this Executive Update analyzes data from Cutter Consortium's ongoing Business-IT Strategies Survey to explore the facets of decentralized IT.

An interesting report crossed my desk as I began to write this Executive Update. The report mentioned a large number of CIOs at a lecture on legacy to Web evolution who wanted less radical approaches to connecting e-business initiatives to their legacy systems. Why? The consensus was that the solutions on offer were too expensive and risky.

Attending yet another project management course seems to be a common reward for being part of a failed project. However, having served as a member of project teams, a project manager, a project director, and a member of several steering committees -- and having attended a number of project management courses -- I have begun to realize that most failures have little to do with the project manager's abilities.

In my last two Executive Updates (Vol. 2, Nos. 2 and 4), I profiled e-projects and analyzed their performance, along with the performance of current management practices.

This Executive Update contains the third, and last, part of our series containing advice from a panel of Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants -- Mike Epner, Ian Hayes, David Herron, and Wendell Jones -- on the outsourcing process.

In Part 1 of this Executive Update (Vol. 2, No. 5), we looked at internal strategy and process maturity and their respective impacts on offshore outsourcing. In this Update, we'll continue to look at the management of offshore service providers.

Telecommuting is both a familiar concept and a popular buzzword in today's high-tech, Internet-enabled society. As we suggested in a Cutter Consortium Business Technology Trends E-Mail Advisor last year (" Telecommuting Still Has a Long Way to Go," 9 November 2000):

The Cutter Technology Council's Assertion #13 reads: "E-business and e-commerce will continue to fuel explosive growth in, and unending confusion about, the middleware portion of IT architectures." The purpose of this Executive Update is to consider whether there is evidence of this trend in industry today.

The process of creating software has come a long way since the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) was established at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. SEI was sponsored by the US Department of Defense and given the charter of advancing the practice of software engineering from an ad hoc, labor-intensive activity to a well-managed discipline that is supported by technology.

The 22 February e-Project Management E-Mail Advisorsparked a lively debate between the author, Jim Highsmith, and Karl Wiegers, well-known author and frequent contributor to the Cutter IT Journal. This Executive Update contains the original advisor, the debate between Highsmith and Wiegers, and an interesting comment from Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Chris Pickering.

This Executive Update contains the second part of our series containing advice from a panel of Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants -- Mike Epner, Ian Hayes, David Herron, and Wendell Jones -- on the outsourcing process.

Editor's note: Assertion #32 from the Cutter Technology Council states, "There will be an increasing move to highly dynamic business-to-business (B2B) relationships." This assertion will be debated in an upcoming Council Opinion.

Without a great deal of fanfare, instant messaging (IM) has become a major interest area for a good many companies. Like so many technologies, it slipped under the corporate radar as part of the Internet, disguised as a way to let teenagers and retired people talk to each other. Somewhere along the line, it became obvious that millions of people were using IM to send billions of messages each day.

Remote access and virtual private network (VPN) growth continue to accelerate, due to an increasingly mobile work force and the globalization of companies. The rate of growth in these technologies is causing some unique challenges for IT management.

I have been involved with statistical analysis of IT trends since 1989. Gathering and analyzing statistics provides a reality check of actual industry practices against anecdotal evidence, vendor hype, and media hyperbole. The most enjoyable results for me are when the statistics differ so significantly from popular perception that they demand we reconsider our thinking.

The quiet revolution of the Internet and its related technologies continues unabated despite the negative swings in the stock market. Although the hype and hope associated with dot-coms and the new economy have started to fade, make no mistake: the pervasive and profound force of the Internet is very much a part of the real economy, and we ignore the consequences at our peril.

Recently, a well-known methodologist asked me what books or courses I would recommend to those just getting started in component-based development. This shocked me a bit. I've been writing about component development for so long that I tend to think everyone must already know about components. I must realize, of course, that most of my readers are managers or developers working on cutting-edge projects.

During the meteoric rise of e-business, e-business hype grew right along with dot-com market valuations -- until the bubble burst in the spring of 2000. Since that time, the hype has dropped from the absolutely ridiculous ("e-business is changing the laws of economics") to the merely unrealistic ("e-business will change the world as we know it").