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The article discusses the importance and significance of professional certifications in computer-based occupations and industries. It examines the value of certification, how employees should consider the value of different levels and qualities of certification, and the opportunity costs of certification.

The article reports on the use of supercomputers in China. It mentions the development of computer systems by Chinese companies, the software developed for the computers to work with artificial intelligence and big data, and the kinds of applications for which the supercomputers are used.

The article discusses climate change and the computer industry's effects on the environment. The author argues that the computing community needs to embrace the challenge of reducing carbon emissions. Additional suggestions to reduce carbon emissions are also mentioned including the participation in computing sustainability events.

The article presents discussion on the importance of increasing participation of individuals with disabilities within the computing field, focusing on the successes of the AccessComputing initiative sponsored by the University of Washington. Topics addressed include description of the need for contributions by disabled persons within the field, the history of the program, and several lessons learned and challenges identified by the project.

The article discusses the computer company Apple Inc. and its reported discovery of a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) vulnerability involving the firm's iOS 6.0 computer operating system in 2014, focusing on man-in-the-middle computer attacks and various computer bugs (viruses). An apparent short circuit involving an SSL/TLS (Transport Layer Security) handshake algorithm is mentioned, along with the U.S. National Vulnerability Database and the C computer programming language. Computer coding standards and duplications of "goto" statements are examined.

The article refers to intellectual property law in the United States and focuses on the computer industry where software is protected by patent and copyright. The issues of a network effect impacting innovation in software development, of the outlook for using intellectual property rights to protect software, of the "commons-based creativity" argument for allowing access to open source software, of a perception that the U.S. court system's view of computers is related to unpatentable ideas and multiple patentable machines, and of the rationale for wanting to patent business methods.

The article presents a discussion of offshore outsourcing as a business strategy in the computer software development industry. Known as Global Software Development (GSD), this approach is said to be an increasingly standard practice. Its theoretical advantages include the possibility of 24-hour production schedules, and the use of an internationally broad range of talent. However, problems which can arise due to time zone differences, geographical distances and cultural differences are noted. An analysis is presented which attempts to quantify the trade-offs between the negative and positive aspects of GSD.

The article discusses efforts to make computer software more dependable, examining requirements for computer software developers to produce direct evidence that their software is dependable. Advantages to this approach include greater credibility and reduced costs, the author suggests. Topics include the lack of databases in the software industry that record the causes or effects of software failure and industry data that would support software developers efforts to improve design and development strategies.

The article discusses the development of computers, examining the chronology of transitions in the computer industry from 32-bit and 64-bit microprocessor systems. Future software will be effected by decisions made in the past, decisions that have unintended consequences and side effects that last for decades, the author states. Topics include running out of address space, the predictability of Moore's Law, and customers that are unable to use computer memory they can afford. Also discussed is the usage of C data types.

The article focuses on the business of software as examined in the 2014 Research Edition of the "QSM Software Almanac" published by Quantitative Software Management (QSM). Topics discussed include the core metrics that provide insights into the health of software projects and organizations, some industry trends over time such as project duration, the decline of project effort along with the delivered size of systems, and the median project team size, and some useful approaches for the measurement of projects as described in the Almanac.

The article discusses the potential for cognitive bias to appear in the development of computer software, examining the use of traceability to eradicate the effect of cognitive bias while individuals perform change to design artifacts. Software developers may employ heuristics that are informed by cognitive biases when changing software artifacts, the article states. Other topics include the use of the cognitive aid traceability, simplifying complex inference tasks, the use of anchoring and adjustment, and peoples' initial estimates about a problem.

The article discusses flash memory, examining the uses for flash memory that strike a balance between its cost and performance. The cost for manufacturing flash memory has fallen, the article indicates, while its density has improved and it has been adopted for many applications. Topics include its limited success as primary storage, the creation of solid-state disks (SSD's) to replace conventional drives, and the use of flash drive to enhance existing storage. Also discussed is the use of flash memory to form a tier in the hierarchy of storage.

The article discusses the use of aspect-oriented techniques to construct high-quality multi-agent systems in computer programming. Advances in network-based software applications and the penetration of ubiquitous computing are pushing consumers toward a world of autonomous software architectures. The trend focuses on the use of agent technology as a complement to the object paradigm for computer applications, including e-commerce, software development environments, and personal digital assistants. The authors examine the use of software agents in computer programming.

The article discusses the unauthorized use of wireless Internet by users that are external to an organization. The use is problematic for both sides of the organization, since unauthorized users risk civil and criminal liability and network providers risk system intrusion and disruption. The authors examine the motivation for roaming use outside of the network as well as an organization's justification for Wi-Fi networks, which include operational benefits, lower economic costs, and convenient Internet access.

The article discusses the mental processes that lead to success and failure in code review during computer software engineering. The results of a study funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the British government's leading funding agency for research and training in engineering, which investigated if there is a specific personality type that is correlated with performance on code-review tasks, are analyzed. The study revealed that there are likely innate human traits that affect code review ability.

The article discusses multi-agent systems, which are gaining acceptance in the computer industry and academia as a paradigm for designing and developing software systems. The author suggests that there is a need for a conceptual framework that defines the abstractions of different agent-based systems, which can be very confusing for software engineers. The authors stress the fact that successful multi-agent system deployment requires modeling languages to explore the use of agent-related abstractions. Methods to reduce risk with the system are examined.

The article discusses benefits of managing risk in offshore computer software systems development. While outsourcing computer engineers provides benefits in terms of low-cost labor, these benefits can often be outweighed by missed deadlines, dissatisfied users, and a failure to reduce development costs. To manage these risks, organizations can create standardized documentation, deliver clear goals to the outsourced workers, establish trust between organizations, and use a subsidiary to manage the company.

The article discusses the design of data intensive Web applications using Web marts, focusing on content accessibility for disabled users. Web marts are systems that provide several dimensions of access with different levels of detail depending on a user's needs. The author's discuss modeling content, which is considered the most important aspect of data-intensive Web applications. Methods to design content-accessible Web applications, including classical data models and hypertext contextual models, are analyzed.

The article discusses the concept of "flow" in games and other computer software. Flow represents the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, characterized by a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment. The eight major components of Flow, which include a challenging activity requiring skill, a merging of action and awareness, clear goals, direct and immediate feedback, concentration on the task at hand, a sense of control, a loss of self consciousness, and an altered sense of time, are analyzed.

The article discusses machine systems that generate musical accompaniment that follows live human performances by relating musical sound to musical notation. The prevalence of computer-accessible music, including sampled audio files found on compact discs and the Internet, is contrasted by symbolic music representations, which lists notes with pitch, onset time, and duration, though both are difficult for current computer systems to understand. The article focuses on music score matching, which automatically generates music to accompany an existing arrangement.

The article discusses disk wiping, which is the process of destroying all digital data on a computer system so that it can never be recovered. Disk wiping is important when users are concerned with privacy or are attempting to guard corporate and personal secrets. An evaluation comparing several popular consumer and professional disk wiping utilities, including Cipher, which is built into Microsoft Windows, Cyberscrub, PGP Shred, Wincleaner Destroy-It! Pro, and Evidence Eliminator, is presented.

This article focuses on enabling computer-aided design systems (CAD) with the ability to automatically invent new solutions. This idea is controversial because some researchers believe creativity is too unpredictable to be envisaged by a computer system, while others defend the potential capacity of computers to reach novel solutions using mechanisms very different from those humans use to be creative. The authors argue that several problems must be solved before a system can be developed that is significantly more helpful than current CAD systems, and point out that no autonomous design system that offers the same degree of satisfaction as working with a human designer has yet been developed.

This article focuses on effective aids to assist computing professionals explore computing literature. Several efforts have been made to serve this community, including the Networked Computer Technical Reference Library, which grew out of efforts to collect technical reports from academic and research departments. The purpose of the paper is to provide illustrations of how the computing community can be assisted by richer support for exploratory search, related to the authors' work with the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL).

The article discusses reuse knowledge management in the development of software. Reuse has long been an idea ahead of its time. As knowledge management increasingly becomes crucial to the survival of software organizations, it is imperative that software development organizations appreciate that knowledge exploitation is a dynamic, three-pronged process that covers public, quasi-public, and private knowledge spaces. Two recent trends in computing have brought reuse to the forefront. These include open source development projects such as Linux, and component-based software development. The success of open source development rests on individuals contributing code fragments, scripts, and ideas to the public knowledge space associated with the project. The most frequent users of open source knowledge and code are rookies rather than experts, and temporary project teams rather than the permanent open source community directly associated with the project. However, the success of open source projects depends on experts and veteran programmers contributing to the public knowledge space. The success of the open source model therefore depends upon new and different types of incentive systems to sustain high-quality knowledge contributions in the medium and long run.

The article discusses the development of computer software. Software is nurtured and cultivated in several different environments from universities to firms. In each environment software is nurtured differently, which in turn influence the final features of software. This simple observation has important implications not only for software development, but also for society. Scholars studying software have emphasized that software designs contain biases that favor certain actors or social values. The article argues that an important source of values in software is the institution in which it is developed. An institution is composed of a group of actors who are subject to a system of rules that structures their activities. These rules concern goals, rights, procedures, social norms, and formal legal rules that attenuate individual preferences. The purpose of this institution is to expand the frontiers of knowledge. Many significant computing technologies have emerged from universities including the Internet, artificial intelligence, and computer graphics.

This article presents information on the growth and evolution of the Internet industry. Increasingly, hard copy journals and other scholarly material are made available online. This article proposes an alternative approach--an open source research approach--to research and publication. The open source research approach borrows significantly from the process used by the open source software movement. Peer review is considered one of the most important safeguards to higher quality research and thus open peer review would make available more reviewers thereby increasing the scrutiny and feedback for each research work. The open source research approach as described would allow others to easily communicate with the writers concerning their work during its development. By using the proposed open research approach, academicians and practitioners with similar interests could more readily discover each other and have the opportunity to team up on projects. Clearly, an open and online approach to the current research process would result in additional opportunities for collaboration and agenda setting.

This article focuses on the interplay between computer software and fine art. Compared to other artistic media, software has a very short history. Casting software as an artistic medium might strike many people as odd, or even objectionable, but there is a growing body of evidence to show that it is perceived and utilized in just this way. Programmers passionate about their work may sense an aesthetic that underlies their approach to software development and provides them with visceral feedback at every stage of development. In the past four years new-media art festivals have presented awards for artistic software and art museums have featured software in exhibitions. The renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth has expounded on the art inherent in both programming and the program since the 1970s. As the sole developer of a number of large software projects, notably the still-popular TeX typesetting program, he has developed a refined sense of software aesthetics. As a professor at Stanford University, he also has had ample opportunity to subjectively assess the work of his students.

The article informs that in the last quarter-century the computing industry has grown much faster than the overall economy, although with some year-to-year fluctuation. Areas with the potential for high growth catch the attention of numerous constituencies. When the growth rate at the end of the dot-com bubble was projected to be lower, the profit projection for year 10 fell by a huge amount, and valuations consequently crashed. The lesson from the sudden rise and fall of Internet-based investments is that growth rate is extremely important. A successful entrepreneur must necessarily look for a sustained, rapidly growing market to enter as it has the best prospects. During the dot-com bubble, many firms poured millions of dollars to increase the adoption rate. When they failed, the negative cash flow from lack of sales was too severe for them to sustain operations. The best indicator of a successful entrepreneurial venture is a rapid increase in revenue. The need for revenue in the long run has always been obvious to businesses.

The article focuses on the different methods adopted by software companies for management of risk. Some companies involved in the business of software have a very curious attitude toward risk. On one hand, they may assert that they are risk tolerant, even bragging about it as if it was some measure of development vitality. Such companies may routinely embrace highly risky project scenarios. But there are other companies that willfully and enthusiastically embark on highrisk projects, and exhibit astonishment or even anger when such projects fail--casting about for some hapless scapegoat to take the blame for the decision and its failure. It is as if the concepts of risk and failure are somehow disconnected. Every software project involves some degree of risk. The reason is that, at the time one starts a project, there are always key variables of the project that are simply not known. Management, whose primary function is to exert control, usually requests and requires that decisions are always guaranteed to be correct and that no surprises occur.

This article focuses on the quality of computing journals over the last 15 years. The importance of journals in a discipline naturally leads to the question of relative journal quality. As a result, a number of studies have ranked a variety of journals. To address the variability across journal ranking studies, a method is presented to average journal rankings across studies. This method is used with nine such studies published between 1991-2003 to produce a composite ranking of the top 50 journals across these studies. It also points out interesting trends in journal ranking studies, the first being that sampling methods have progressed from mailed, to emailed, to online surveys. One key advantage of online surveys--convenience--has undoubtedly contributed to two other trends in these studies: increasing sample sizes and increasing numbers of international respondents. The fourth trend is an increasing number of journals for respondents to rank. To be able to average journal rankings across studies, authors had to calculate a common denominator to account for differing numbers of journals in each ranking.

This article proposes a definition that distinguishes portals from all other types of information systems and a General Portal Model for identifying and organizing the basic services portals provide. The potential of the web portal market and its technology has attracted some of the biggest computer and software firms. It has inspired the mutation of search engines and the establishment of new vendors. Yet the meaning of portal is not well defined and its use, even within the industry, remains problematic. Originally coined to describe Web-based applications that provide organized access to the resources of the Internet through search engines and lists of Web sites, the term portal has been applied to systems that differ widely in capabilities and complexity, from static Web pages providing links to resources on a given topic to interorganizational systems providing access to multiple heterogeneous data sources and applications. Portal is defined as an infrastructure providing secure, customizable, personalizable, integrated access to dynamic content from a variety of sources, in a variety of source formats, wherever it is needed.

The article presents the 2004 award ceremony of the journal "Communications of the ACM" at the Plaza hotel in New York City. About 200 industry luminaries attended the function. The event recognizes technical excellence and outstanding service in the computing field. The journal's most prestigious technical award, the "A. M. Turing Award," was presented to Alan Kay, Hewlett-Packard senior fellow. Kay recalled many of the computing pioneers that inspired him throughout his professional career, quoting from among others the writings of Alan Turing. The Software System Award was awarded to Stuart Feldman. The 2003 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award was presented to two computer scientists who have made theoretical and methodological contributions whose widespread adoption changed the scientific world beyond computer science and engineering. The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to AnHai Doan, University of Illinois, for his dissertation 'Learning to Map between Structured Representations of Data.'

This article presents information on various events related to the computer industry to be held in several countries. 18th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation 2004 will be held in Kufstein, Austria on May 16-19, 2004. The 17th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems will be held in Ottawa, Ontario on May 17-19. Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium will be held in Toronto, Ontario on May 25-28. International Conference on Management of Data and Symposium on Principles Database and Systems will be held in Paris, France on June 13-18.

This article reports that strategic business challenge facing all software companies is how to train their employees to keep pace with the software industry's ever-changing knowledge and development requirements. Organizations increasingly recognize that formal training is critical not only to the success of their software professionals but to their competitive position in the marketplace. While the training of technical employees is not a new challenge, measuring that training for effectiveness and efficiency remains a daunting task. Today, the training function must focus on sustainable competitive advantage by strategically aligning itself with overall corporate business goals. Senior managers involved in training question whether the training function derives its inputs from suppliers or from consumers in improving its end deliverables. Failing to link training and development to some kind of improvement, training managers risk their own futures in their companies, as well as their companies' business performance in the marketplace.

This article presents the author's comments on the authenticity of standards meant for the computer industry. It is informed that standards play a significant and vital role for the industry by enforcing security baselines and enabling compatibilities among various products. However, the author holds that, they should not be relied on blindly. According to the author, despite the creation of a standard through an open process, transparency in the certification process is not guaranteed.

Component-based software development (CBSD) offers an effective approach to constructing software products. Based on the concept of component fabrication and assembly, CBSD can help the software industry realize quality and productivity gains similar to those achieved in the hardware and manufacturing industries. In CBSD, one of the greatest challenges facing the component assembler is the discovery of suitable components for constructing customer applications. Because the need for an application is driven by a set of user requirements, finding the components that match those requirements is critical to delivering the desired product. CBSD clearly signals a paradigm shift in software construction. Instead of building applications from scratch, the CBSD paradigm facilitates software development through component fabrication and assembly. CBSD not only discourages construction of new software, but also promotes assembly of pre-built components in developing software applications.

In the late 1980's, artificial intelligence (AI) research encountered a difficult period. Funding agencies had lost faith in the primary, long-term objectives of Al research computers that think, understand, and exhibit expert behavior. The headway toward secondary goals--including speech recognition, pattern recognition, natural language translation, automatic classification, machine inference, diagnostics, decision support, chess, and robotics--was not enough to overcome doubts about achievability of the primary goals. Language-action philosophy reveals practical ways to improve coordination and effective action. A prominent example, discussed, was captured in an email system by Action Technologies called The Coordinator. This system, which ran on half a million IBM DOSP Windows platforms, tracked conversations for action, the loops in which one person performs an action in response to another person's request. In a 1987 demo, my Action Technologies host showed me he could manage twice as many projects using the software.

The decline in personal computer (PC) sales makes sense once we examine the preferences of different adopter categories. Research on PC adoption has tended to assume the same set of innovation characteristics that influence adoption across all adopter categories, yet in reality, systematic differences exist across adopter categories. Early adopters are the opinion leaders, receiving social esteem by being the first of their group to adopt, and maintaining their position by judiciously evaluating innovations for others. Our research findings illustrate the folly of assuming current non-adopters care about the same things as innovators and early adopters, or assuming that all they care about is PC cost. While cost may be a factor for those still holding out, it is neither the only nor the most important factor. Instead, later adopters want long-lasting products that have yet to appear on the horizon. Until the PC industry convinces this group of potential consumers that their PC will operate like a refrigerator, PC sales are likely to continue in their current stalled state.

The current auditing crisis of big business can provide useful lessons and suggestions for improving similar practices within the computer industry. Audit trails, whether computer-based or manually produced, typically form a significant part of the front-line defense for fraud detection and prevention within systems. Many of the security practices revolve around the generation and preservation of authenticated data streams that are to be perused routinely or periodically, as well as in the event of system attack, failure, or other investigations. But these audit trail systems are not necessarily robust, since components can be subverted or ignored. Furthermore, it is the surrounding controls or overriding design-and-use philosophies, that are often discovered to be inadequate or circumvented. Audit trails, whether computer-based or manually produced, typically form a significant part of the front-line defense for fraud detection and prevention within systems. It is incumbent upon us to examine our own auditing practices for their intrinsic vulnerabilities.

This article presents the annual report of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM is an international scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences, and applications of information technology. The U.S. Public Policy Committee of ACM continues to assist policymakers and courts in understanding the broad implications of information technology policies and laws that concern the computing community. The committee played an instrumental role in educating legislators, the judiciary and the public at large as to the damaging impact of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. ACM's Career Resource Centre (CRC), a unique career site for professionals and students debuted this year. The CRC features a Job Centre where academic and corporate employers can post jobs online and job seekers can view lists of postings and post their curriculum vitae. In the coming fiscal year ACM will make a major initiative to take a fundamental look at ACM'S models of membership with the objective to test and implement real change.

Presents letters to the editor related to the computer industry, published in the December 2002 issue of the periodical "Communications of the ACM." Significance of the object-oriented programming; Role of social processing of correctness proofs in computer science; Factors to be kept in mind while publishing contents on the Internet.

This article discusses a unique nationwide component-based development (CBD) promotion project, with emphasis and explanation of insights and lessons learned. In late 1990s, the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC), was inspired by market research on CBD, and began a CBD initiative. After a through investigation and planning, MIC launched a nationwide Component Industry Promotion project in January 1999 to promote the development of CBD technologies and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components. The project has been conducted in four main venues, developing CBD core technologies, developing a library of COTS components, promotion and training in CBD, and developing relevant standards. Different types of organizations have participated and played distinct roles in the project to make it successful. Early in the project, the Object Technology Laboratory of Soongsil University conducted an experimental whole-life cycle CBD project with industry participants on a banking application in order to assess the current state-of-the-art CBD technologies.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues. "Rebirth of the Computer Industry," which focused on the factors that influence developments in the computer industry; "Are Intelligent E-Commerce Agents Partners of Predators?," which focused on intelligent agents and mobile agents.

In the article, the author assumes that the rebirth of the computer industry has begun. According to him, there are a number of signals pointing in this direction, including the general state of the IT industry, awareness of enormous risks associated with the Internet, the U.S. and European antitrust litigation, the open source movement, the IBM autonomous computing announcement, redirection of Microsoft product development, competition from telecommunications industry, and resistance in investing in new general-purpose computer products and services. Regardless of whether Microsoft, IBM, or telecommunications industry establishes the basis for rebirth, this scenario would stimulate worldwide competition in providing highly integrated hardware-software stableware platforms. Stableware and valueware competition would provide opportunities for existing as well as new suppliers around the globe. If this transpires, the general-purpose computer industry would be well on its way to maturity and society would be the benefactor of trustworthy products and services.

Surveying the wreckage of the dot-com marketplace meltdown of 2001, it is easy to overlook the persistence and rapid growth of e-business throughout the U.S. economy. While many high-flying dot-corn firms, including Beyond.com, Boo.com, DrKoop.com, Kozmo.com and Webvan vanished, use of the Internet as an essential business tool continued to grow dramatically. At the peak of the e-business hype in 2000, most pundits ignored the nascent effort of large legacy firms, or those that existed before the advent of e-business and had yet to embrace the Net. A common misperception about e-business was and still is that one either has it or didn't get it. By definition, flashy e-business pure-plays, or the dot-corns, got it and except for a few visionaries, legacy firms didn't. Today, legacy firms represent the future of e-business and understanding e-business from their perspective gives a clearer picture of how e-business will develop in the future. The online grocers represent a clear example. The pure-plays Homegrocer and Webvan received enormous media attention and heavy investment from venture capitalists. Today, both are out of business, while traditional British grocer Tesco has emerged as the most successful grocer online. INSET: Emerging Role of CeCO..

Helpdesks have long been the standard source for end-user computing support. Though they are also called information centers, call centers, and PC support centers, their primary function of helping users help themselves has not changed. In the early days of PC computing, end users viewed helpdesks as a godsend. But today, that attitude seems to have changed, as computing enters the new millennium. Academic studies consistently show that end users are dissatisfied with helpdesk support. This dissatisfaction has driven end users toward other support sources, including local MIS staff, friends, and online help. In a survey conducted in the spring of 1999, the author sought to identify the support services offered by helpdesks and determine whether end users actually use these services. A questionnaire was designed by modifying the instrument developed by R. Mirani and W. King. The author collected data from 197 helpdesks, mostly in the U.S., representing a variety of industries. Results showed that end users used helpdesk support only minimally. Despite this lack of interest by the people they are intended to help, helpdesk support managers can still control key computing resources, while increasing localized support for end users suggests the need to restructure helpdesks. INSET: Instrument Development and Data Collection..

This article presents a list of conferences on computers to be held in different countries from September 2001 to January 2002. The 24th ACM/SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana during September 17-19, 2001. First International Conference on Wireless Internet Technologies will be held in Beijing, China during September 17-19, 2001. LPNMR'01-6th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmotonic Reasoning will be held in Vienna, Austria during September 17-19, 2001. KI-2001-Joint German/Austrian Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held in Vienna, Austria during September 19-21, 2001. Quality of Future Internet Services (QOFIS'2001) will be held in Coimbra, Portugal during September 24-26, 2001. South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Annual Conference SAICSIT 2001 is scheduled to be held in Pretoria Gauteng, South Africa during September 25-28, 2001. ICCIT'01: International Conference on Computing and Information Technologies will be held in Montclair, New Jersey on October 12, 2001.

Although rapid changes in information technology (IT) sector has created opportunities, it is challenging those responsible for it around the world. IT projects are notorious for budget overruns and delays, and the rapid IT change can exacerbate these problems. Therefore managers must make difficult choices and then implement, deliver and support these choices throughout their organization. Rapid IT change can affect budgetary issues in a multitude of ways. For example, it can produce the need for new skills and thus unforeseen training demands. This article discusses a study to understand how IT organizations cope with rapid IT change and how they might better do so. According to the study, IT organizations do not cope effectively with rapid IT changes. This article suggests constructive actions for coping with those effects while capitalizing on the benefits and also provides some guidance for improved coping. Such rapid IT change is likely to persist and different types of IT may require different coping strategies. INSET: How the Survey was Conducted..

While the discipline of computing may be the mother of all these specialties in information technologies, it is not the matriarch. Many IT professionals do not want to be identified as computing technologists, computing does not speak for them. The author explores this further in this article. It is an irony that the computing discipline, which gave birth to the IT profession, is not the driving force in the profession. Computing technologists are the inventors and visionaries, but the field is being driven by the large numbers of pragmatists who are users of the field and include many powerful business, civic, government, and industry leaders. The chasm between scientists and citizens who live and work with technology extends much further than computing. Science journalist Takashi Tachibana says that the chasm between technologists and non-technologists widened during the 20th century into a gulf. Unless technologists can find ways to communicate effectively with multitudes, the basic research enterprise feeding technological development will dry up and the average person will be unable to make well-grounded assessments about technology. INSET: Further Reading..

The article focuses on the need to consider the change-centric Enduring Business Themes (EBTs) standard when building highly adaptable business software systems. Although, it appears obvious that the specification of an easily adaptable software application is primarily a business problem, not a technical one, the most important questions have to do with the underlying business. EBTs can be used as an ideal foundation for the related software application, specifically, after the appropriate enduring themes of the business industry are understood and catalogued, an adaptable software framework is proposed and be constructed using object-oriented (OO) technology as an implementation approach. Such an adaptable software framework is called an "enduring business framework" (EBF). A properly constructed EBF enables the rapid construction of business objects and business applications that support the corresponding EBT. One of the most glaring problems with OO technology has been the failure management to exercise its proper role in the software process, cited with examples of problems of central planning lacking city, city problem, custom manufacturing and transportation. The article points out that EBTs are superior and to build adaptable business applications in a short time frame at a reasonable cost , it is necessary to be clear in separation of policy from mechanism, enduring issues from temporal, and difficult implementation problems from trivial.