In-Depth Features


Five Offshoring Requirements

According to Denny Morris of Parsippany, NJ-based Delta Services Corporation, successful offshore software development has five requirements.

When does the bus arrive?

With all the major server vendors planning to incorporate ESB capabilities into their core offerings within a few years, IT managers are wondering whether to jump in now with major ESB upgrades, or wait for the capability to show up in their new Microsoft or IBM servers with only the incremental cost to pay.

Provide a Common Frame of Reference

The job of technology architecture is to help people better organize, visualize, and communicate about technology.

Architecting Around Activities

Structure your IT organization to meet developing business environments.

Write a Web Service Client

Web services have become a standard for building client/server applications. Learn an approach for using the JAX-RPC SI toolkit to generate a Web service's client-side code.

Software factories come into modern times

What if software were manufactured like an automobile or a refrigerator, using off-the-shelf components and assembly-line production techniques to help automate many of the most repetitive development tasks? A new Microsoft strategy revives debate over whether software development can become a manufacturing discipline.

It's true: Location is everything

Location-based services help enterprises track employees, manage inventories, process customer orders and even find potential customers

Project management makes for a credible integration story

Gartner, which plots market leaders and challenges in a "Magic Quadrant," says the 2004 project and portfolio management leaders are Primavera, Niku, Mercury, PlanView, Systemcorp, and Lawson Software; and the challengers are Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft.

Project portfolio managment promises to step up to the ROI challenge

IT and the enterprise want it all: time to market, quality, and cost. And they want it quickly. Now, they just might have the right stuff to get it.

Model of integrating components

Two years ago, the Object Management Group (OMG) introduced the model-driven architecture (MDA), a development specification that taps the OMG’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) to automate the integration of software from applications, middleware, or custom components. To a certain extent, says Thomas Murphy, a vice president with consultancy META Group, the software factory and its attendant notion of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) constitute Microsoft’s response to MDA.

Proper project management can increase the odds

Although Standish Group has seen overall improvements in project success rates, data from the second quarter of 2004 showed only 29% of projects succeeded, while 18% failed and 53% were challenged.

Reader’s Digest turns over a new leaf in business rules

When a user ran “purge transaction history” just to see what it would do and lost a history of all transactions, the IT department at publisher Reader’s Digest Association (RDA) knew it was in trouble.

Achieve Optimal Performance

Response time and scalability are key to optimal performance of your enterprise's applications. Set expectations and provide analysis tools to help you achieve performance goals.

The goal: Automating policies, procedures

Logical Apps’ flagship product, AppsRules, integrates with the business rules engine in Oracle E-business Suite. From an architectural standpoint, the product sits on top of each of the elements of the Oracle applications technology stack, according to Chris Capdevila, LA’s CEO and co-founder.

Happy Returns from app integration: Q&A Kathy Quirk, Nucleus Research

Kathy Quirk is research manager for Nucleus Research in Wellesley, Mass., a provider of ROI-focused research and advisory services. ADT recently spoke with her about the costs and paybacks from enterprise application integration.

More hype than reality to offshore outsourcing?

Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry used outsourcing as an issue during this year’s campaign as a way of saying President Bush cared little about the American worker. (Remember Kerry’s attempt to connect it with the war on terror with his charge that Bush had “outsourced” the job of capturing Osama bin Laden?) As Bush prepares for his second term, what lies ahead for IT outsourcing, especially work that may be headed outside the U.S.?

Planning for success by planning for failure

Avoiding failure is obviously critical to any plan for success, and requires constant patrolling for signs of processes gone awry, support slipping away and other omens of impending doom.

Failing to fear is more important than fearing to fail

Among the most critical skills lacking in project management today are the ability to say “no,” and the willingness to be a naysayer.

A look forward, a look back

Because Longhorn remains a vague concept to most Microsoft customers, a clue to its eventual success might be found by looking at how the installed base fared with .NET, released barely two years ago.

Illusory connectivity: Web sites to databases

There are a ‘bazillion’ different ways of going about it, says one expert.