The bad news is that most of the challenges you face are not related to technology. Before we move on to the good news, let’s consider a couple of stoppers. First let’s talk about some challenges related to information resource management and business practices. You need to identify the businesswide information needs; otherwise, you will be providing just another source of confusion. Providing tools that ease access to the right information at the right time is also important. After all, any benefits from information availability can be negated immediately if the people in your business spend all their time trying to track down the information. From a people perspective, issues are generally related to culture and current working practices. They include motivation to share, to use, and to add value to what is there already. Most people have become accustomed to the information push paradigm, in which information is constantly being thrown at them. The Internet and Web is very much a pull paradigm, in which users are expected to go out and get information.
The ability to customize rapid application development is a basic requirement for any future application strategies, particularly since IT functions worldwide are now expected to develop, deploy, and support technology solutions to meet business needs in a timely manner. To have this ability, you need an architecture that is robust, flexible, and responsive to the ever-changing needs of the whole enterprise.
The good news is that we are seeing a plethora of tools and products to assist with the complexities of delivering real business solutions on the Internet and the Web. Visual Basic 5 is just one product that offers the potential of enabling existing applications to access the Internet, integrating existing applications with Web sites, integrating other popular Internet protocols, and offering developers a rapid application development (RAD) tool to merge client/server and Internet technologies.