InformationWeek

January 5, 1998

By John Soat
Illustrations by Matt Foster

n what became a signature comment on the lack of understanding among racial, ethnic, age, and gender groups in 1960s America, Strother Martin's prison guard character chastises Paul Newman's misbehaving prisoner in the movie Cool Hand Luke: "What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

Well, it's 1998, and what we have here is a desire to communicate. Communication-the lack of it, the need for it, the ability to carry it out-is the binding theme of this year's "Hot In '98" special feature issue, and with good reason. The need to understand and embrace the competitive landscape is demanding new forms of communication both within and without organizations.

Take, for example, the year 2000 date-compliance problem. It is creating an urgency that mandates communication among users, vendors, and partners to understand the parameters of the problem, define the best solutions, and minimize the risk of exposure. On the other hand, the urgent expansion of the Internet is creating opportunities for data communications providers to offer voice communications services, as well.

Knowledge management, beyond its technology implications, demands collaboration among all levels of an organization to share and capture hard-won know-how.

Extranets and virtual private networks provide the infrastructure for the new communication, and both efforts are proceeding at an accelerated-if measured-pace. Meanwhile, hardware performance, which provides the engine of communication, continues to rev at a blistering pace. As multiprocessing technology takes hold, clustering becomes a reality, and the next-generation storage architecture, Fibre Channel, moves to the top of user s' storage strategies.

Communication involves understanding. The use of online analytical processing and data mining technologies gives users a deeper understanding of the information locked away in their corporate databases. Also, voice recognition software adds a human interface to IT systems that improves productivity and spurs electronic commerce.

This communication imperative calls for new ways to put the old IT architecture together. The promise of object-oriented soft- ware programming-development, deployment, reuse-is fulfilled with component-management technology. And enterprise resource planning applications are being expanded to include participants up and down the supply chain.

Still, this year will see its own communication breakdown: Think Java vs. Win98, thin clients vs. full-blown PCs, Windows NT vs. Unix, and Netscape Navigator vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer. But such small misunderstandings will be hard- pressed to derail the new communication imperative.