When building the right project team to complete a custom solution there are many forces at work. These include business drivers, technical drivers, and organizational and political motivations. Regardless of the business or organization there are three basic rules to follow in building a team to deliver a technical solution. The first is to involve the business before the team is even assembled. Each organization has certain technology standards that govern specific tools and products that can be used on a given project.

Time is money in any industry, but for life sciences companies a single day of having a new drug on the market can be worth hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars. And that money, in addition to its obvious effect on the balance sheet, funds research into new treatments that can literally mean life and death.

Whether they produce cameras, equipment to make semiconductors, plasma TVs, medical equipment, printers, or cell phones, electronics companies share an all-encompassing requirement; they must continually bring more innovative products to market faster than ever before.

Banks are facing increasing pressure to reinvent and expand their businesses. They need to respond to increasing regulatory and security requirements, expectations for new levels of customer service, the broader globalization of markets, and price pressure on their services.

A trend begun on factory floors in an effort to replace low- and medium-skilled blue-collar workers so companies could save money, outsourcing has recently become a heated election-year issue. While it is difficult to hide plant closings and relocate their operations, it takes only a few clicks of a mouse on a virtual ledger to lay off hundreds, if not thousands, and hire 10 times as many more overseas.

The IBM WebSphere family of products can be a lot of different things to different people, and – just like any family – each member has its own strengths and weaknesses.

As the old saying goes, 'Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.' Well, there's a bit of such crass finger-pointing going on inside each corporate IT operations and development staff every day.

The 'P' word surely gets thrown around a lot these days. It's time to determine what's real and what's not - and for the sake of this article, let's keep our focus on enterprise, or corporate, portals.

As a closing thought, let's consider our jobs and how to protect them. There is a lot of instability in today's software industry, and the American sector is losing its competitive edge.

Lotus Notes certainly was one of the most successful rapid application development platforms of the '90s. The speed at which you could develop workflow applications to streamline your business processes was simply unparalleled.

At this year's annual gathering of the tribe at JavaOne in San Francisco, Sun announced its intention to increase the number of Java developers from 3 million to 10 million.

In the past, corporate intranets were built from the ground up with various tools and technologies. Some companies hoped to establish a solution that would not only address a current problem but be flexible enough to handle future expansion.

Information that is readily available to the right people at the right time, and that enables them to act quickly and decisively, is a crucial requirement of enterprises that intend to grow and remain profitable. The intelligent delivery of information must obtain maturity levels consistent with enterprise goals and must employ the appropriate technology to facilitate this purpose.

A few months back, in this very spot, I wrote that in 2003 we would see an uptick in IT spending. Then I asked the question, 'Where will the money be spent?' Some read this as welcome news foreshadowing the revitalization of the IT sector; others viewed it as wishful thinking. Clearly those who see it as wishful thinking also see the glass as half empty. These people are running out of what made IT grow and flourish in the first place: innovation.

Organizations have traditionally viewed the management of digital identities as a necessary expense. But now those same organizations see it as a strategic imperative, something that will help them succeed by adding business value. Strategic security initiatives, like identity and access management, present organizations with real business opportunities and provide a framework for managing digital identities.

Entity beans have been much maligned lately, largely for their inability to scale and difficulty to develop and maintain. However, there remain some compelling reasons to consider using entity beans to persist data in a J2EE application. For example, survivability of entity beans, where state can be recovered following a hard crash, lends to increased reliability when the server is running.

Analysts and suppliers are all predicting a big upturn in tech spending during 2003, which is good news for the industry as a whole. It is certainly welcome news for software vendors and developers, who have been hit hard over the past year. It's also good news for the economy as a whole because new tech spending should spur jobs and thus spur spending. However there is still a huge question that is in need of an answer: Where will those IT dollars be spent, and who will control the purse strings?

Choosing a technology vendor today may seem like a game of chance. With many 'dot-coms' turned into 'dot-bombs,' laid-off employees have turned to consulting as a way to earn a living. Now, I do not begrudge anyone earning a living. I consider myself to be a consummate capitalist. But as the number of vendors claiming to be Java-WebSphere specialists has multiplied, sorting through various proposals may feel like spinning the wheel of some game of chance.

Sports cars are typically measured by how fast they go from zero to sixty. But is that really the best measurement? Would a Honda Accord with a 500 hp V8 be a better sports car than a Porsche 911 Turbo? Obviously not. It takes a well-rounded vehicle to achieve this status - handling, braking, acceleration, reliability, etc. The same is true with development tools. Speed isn't everything. Agility is equally important. You need a well-rounded tool to create the best application.

Companies confront more challenges today than ever before. The business environment of the Internet-driven economy is more volatile, demanding, and complex. Given the events of the past year, businesses uncertain about the financial future have been reluctant to increase their workforce or spend capital.

Faster deployment. Who would say no? It's the dream of every project manager, business line manager, and CIO to get software out in the shortest time, at the lowest cost. However, it's an ideal that is rarely met.

There are some undeniable truths about the state of IT operations today and their direction for the future. The recent recessionary environment, coupled with IT talent shortages that already existed, has turned the IT operations group into an embattled organization - greater and greater responsibilities with fewer and less-trained resources to manage very complex, n-tier business systems. IT administrators need all the help they can get from the Enterprise Systems Management vendor community; not just more monitoring software ('Yes I can see it, but what does it all mean?'), but rather an intelligent and active management approach.

The portal product market has matured significantly since its birth in 1998. In the early days, 'pure-play' vendors provided the only options for enterprises evaluating portal products. This situation quickly changed as existing software vendors came to recognize the market desire for the functionality that the portal promised. Many of these companies, however, either misjudged the resources that would be required to thrive in this technology space or found themselves going down a path which few would-be customers were willing to follow.

Sometimes the mistakes of youth can haunt a person later in life. If you aren't careful, the same could happen to your business with high-tech's latest industry game changer: Web services. It's the next phase in e-business and something every executive should be considering. If the first phases of e-business focused on extending existing business systems to the Web, this next phase is about linking your systems with those of your suppliers, customers, and partners. This will save time and money, and could change the competitive landscape.

Years ago, retailers grew by opening new stores, thus gaining new customers and sales revenue from each new locale. As many retailers added stores, an over-stored condition resulted. Retailing success then depended more on increasing revenues by maintaining customer loyalty and attracting customers from less successful retailers. This customer loyalty was achieved by providing acceptable products and competitive prices, and giving the customer a positive, even exciting, experience in the store. Thus, success came to the retailer that made customers feel special while providing convenience at an acceptable price.

Time. The most precious commodity on the planet – every year there seems to be less of it available. Less time for hobbies, less time to play with the kids, less time to sleep. Many long for a simpler age, when there were fewer pressures, fewer complexities, and more leisure time. Most likely that perception stems from personal aging, not generational. In fact, studies show we now have more discretionary time than 30 years ago. Yet it doesn’t matter; perception is reality. Ask almost any professional colleague what they want more of and typically the answer is time.

Recently, several companies announced upgrades to their developer sites. Let’s look at IBM’s ongoing efforts in this area. IBM has a development community of 1.6 million registered users. In the two years since its inception, developerWorks has offered multiple online and offline resources, achieved 85,000 downloads of Web services technologies from IBM alphaWorks, and distributed over 55,000 WebSphere CDs.

We've all seen the headlines and understand the recent downturn of the economy and of business in general, but what we in the technology community continue to struggle with is hearing the omnipresent mantra of 'faster, better, and cheaper.' Demonstrating increased value within these constraints becomes one of the key drivers for all types of technology projects - from day-to-day software maintenance activities to delivery of that one Web-enabled function that will placate corporate business owners until the next 'must have' wave of technology emerges.

Within the next few years we will all be connected to networks for almost every purpose in our lives. Our TVs, our cars, our refrigerators, and maybe even our pets, are all going to be plugged into some network that will make our lives better. Better? Is that simpler or more complex? Either way it won't matter, it's going to be more interesting. Let's accept for a moment that soon everything will be plugged into the great network and we will all achieve digital Nirvana - who can say what the great network is? Is it the Internet?