As Director of Risk Management Systems, David Miller is head of the IT group that services BankBoston's Global Capital Market Systems group. In addition to maintaining current applications and developing new systems, Miller is heavily involved in the integration of BankBoston systems with those of Fleet Bank, as a result of the banks' recent merger.

The interview in this Executive Update is with the director of corporate technology at a US $700 million consumer goods company. Brought in this year to help revamp the IT department, the director talks about his struggle to move IT forward in an environment where IT is often the scapegoat for business underperformance and where business models are unclear.

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. -- Alfred North Whitehead

The basic structure of XML is the document. This terminology, however, might cause one to think of XML as only a richer, more flexible HTML. It is richer and more flex-ible, but it can be so much more as well. Thinking of XML as a document allows you to see how it can be used for presentation of data. This presentation can be detailed and useful, as we will see from the way XML is constructed.

As manager of business systems analysis at Focus on the Family -- an international, nonprofit organization of Christian ministries including print publications, radio, and video -- Paul Lewandowski is responsible for managing a team of analysts that works to determine the IT needs for 1,300 employees partitioned into more than 70 divisions.

This Executive Update provides an outline of the information presented by Brad Kain, Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Distributed Computing Architecture/e-Business Advisory Service, at a recent symposium on e-commerce project management.

This Executive Update provides a summary of the information presented by Hoa Nguyen at Cutter Consortium's recent symposium on e-business strategy. Nguyen presented a case study on Case Shiller Weiss (CSW), an organization that specializes in the research and analysis of the residential real estate market.

Tony Candito, CIO of New England Financial (NEF), has been with the company since 1974. He is responsible for a staff of approximately 800 people in multiple locations. In this Executive Update, Candito talks about his most recent challenge, combining NEF's IT department with a portion of the IT department of its parent company, Metlife.

One of the key factors in misalignment is change. There is so much change, things are moving so much faster, and business models are changing -- dramatically. We all know about the e-commerce initiatives from Internet companies such as Amazon.com, Dell, Cisco, and Intel.

In this Executive Update, Greenwich Associates' Curtis Ehrgott describes the company's move from legacy systems to three-tier architecture and Web-based distributed systems. Greenwich Associates is a privately held financial services consulting firm that conducts proprietary market research and consults to providers of commercial financial services.

In this Executive Update, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Michael Mah discusses the alignment issues involved with creating and maintaining relationships between corporations and outsourcers. Mah works with clients to help them establish business agreements that lower the risks involved with outsourcing and to help them resolve outsourcing disputes without resorting to litigation.

Very often, I see an overall corporate misalignment. Often, there are really two companies: a senior management company and the rest of the company. The IT people get stuck in the middle.

In this interview, George Gluecksmann, systems architect for customer support and information systems at Creo Products, Inc., talks about the company's implementation of SAP and subsequent infrastructure changes, including the introduction of a new front-end system and middleware from Active Software.

This Executive Update is the second in a two-part series containing excerpts from a panel discussion on business-IT alignment (see Executive Update, July 1999, No. 2).

This is the final Executive Update in a three-part series on customer service management (CSM). In previous updates (April 1999, No. 2 and June 1999, No. 1), we discussed how customers were not recognizing "best efforts" support as satisfactory in terms of quality and cost.

In this Executive Update, Patrick McNeese describes United Wisconsin Services, Inc.'s (UWSI) current distributed computing initiatives and plans for future development. As the parent company for a group of heath insurance companies, including Blue Cross/Blue Shield United of Wisconsin, UWSI is turning to distributed computing to improve customer services, solve Y2000 noncompliancy issues, and comply with proposed guidelines from the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA).

The Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) is an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard. It offers precise concepts and constructs useful in defining complementary views of business and information systems issues clearly, concisely, and with no ambiguity.

This Executive Update is the first of a two-part series containing excerpts from a panel discussion on business-IT alignment. The discussion followed a presentation on adaptive software development that took place at Summit '99, Cutter Consortium's annual conference for IT professionals, which was held in April in Boston.

We are all familiar with stories of companies that introduce breakthrough technologies in anticipation of major performance gains, only to see the new technologies falter almost before they get started. The reason is often a mystery.

In this Executive Update, Brad Kain, Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Distributed Computing Architecture/e-Business Service, talks about the challenges of incorporating legacy systems into distributed computing architectures.

James Odell, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium Distributed Computing Architecture Service, is also the cochair of the OMG’s Analysis and Design Task Force, the group responsible for the design and modification of the Unified Modeling Language.

In this Executive Update, Paul Harmon, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant, discusses the implications of statistics from the recent Cutter Consortium Distributed Computing Architecture/e-Business survey.

In the April 1999, No. 2 Executive Update, which focused on customer service management (CSM), we discussed the increasing pressure on IT distributed support services. Despite the fact that support personnel are working harder and longer, their efforts go largely unnoticed. The solution is to establish service levels and report on them so that customers and IT support can get on the same page.

A number of studies continue to show that business-IT alignment is a top issue for CIOs. Statistics on alignment indicators from the Cutter Consortium Business-IT Alignment survey suggest that CIOs have good reason to be concerned.

Table 1 summarizes the statistics discussed in this article.