Stories by: Gary H. Anthes

"The single biggest mistake IT managers make is listening to their customers," says Michael Schrage, a research associate at the MIT Media Lab.

Researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. are developing computer systems that make deliberately ambiguous interpretations of human environments. What's more, the systems are often flat-out wrong. But the developers are delighted with their progress so far, saying that with computers, sometimes less is more.

The work of Jim Allen, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is so far removed from everyday experience that he has to explain it by analogy: a tabletop covered with refrigerator magnets. "They all interact with each other and do funny dances," he says.

Eight years ago, there were plenty of tools to search and analyze structured data, and even a few to go after unstructured information such as free-form text. But the two kinds of tools were not integrated, according to Jeffrey Kreulen, senior manager of service-oriented technologies at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose. And the most sophisticated analytic tools used esoteric mathematical techniques that pretty much kept them out of the hands of nontechnical users.

Ike Nassi is something of a renaissance man in IT, having held senior technical positions at some of the biggest companies in the industry and also in academia. He's now the senior vice president for research at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, California. Companies in his CV include SAP, Cisco, Apple, Digital Equipment Corp and several others. Nassi founded Firetide, co-founded Encore Computer, and helped start the Computer History Museum in California. He has held positions at Stanford University, MIT, Boston University and the University of California, Berkeley and played key roles in the design of the Ada programming language and the Mach operating system. Here he tells Gary Anthes what's driving change in the software world

Companies are increasingly extending their operations overseas, looking for new markets, lower labor costs and better access to raw materials. Such expansion can bring advantages, but it can also introduce critical blind spots into supply chains as business and IT managers try to monitor activities thousands of miles away.

Your company scans incoming e-mail for viruses and outgoing messages for confidential information. Your spam filter snags most of the garbage, and it gets better as it learns the latest spamming and phishing spoofs. You're encrypting sensitive e-mail now, and you recently completed a project that keeps your messages safely archived in case federal regulators come knocking.

Not long ago, a major U.S. company embarked on an ambitious Six Sigma program to improve efficiency. The program was a big success, saving the company US$250 million.

Re-engineering programs to work on multicore chips is already difficult but will get even harder as the number of processors continues to multiply.

CIO at large Michael H. Hugos Monday admitted to IT execs at the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders conference that the term "agile enterprise" has a certain faddish buzzword quality. Then he went on to explain why corporations and their IT departments ignore its concepts at their peril.

Relational database management systems have become all but ubiquitous in enterprise computing since 1970, when they were first devised by E.F. Codd. But as powerful and flexible as those databases are, they've proved inadequate for a handful of ultrademanding applications that have to process hundreds or thousands of transactions per second and never go down. Now, the very-high-performance database technologies that sprang up to serve these niche markets, such as options trading and telephone call processing, are poised to move into mainstream computing.