Greg Ricker, CIO, Atlantic Casualty InsuranceCo.

In my experience, there are three areas that ensure successfulsystem implementations. First is to focus on the business. Manytechnology people lose sight of the business objective they aretrying to accomplish and let the technology drive decisions.Technology is the enabler, and when viewed that way, discussionsstay focused on what they should be, and that is the businessobjective. The second area is planning. Many people want to skimpon the planning portion and jump right into building the solution.You have to spend the time planning all phases: project scope,system design, development, testing, implementation, and support.Each requires a dedicated plan. Finally, it's all aboutcommunication. As IT professionals, we can build great solutions,but if we can't communicate with our customers and partners, wehave failed. I've seen many great solutions fail to meet objectivesfor the simple reason of poor and inadequatecommunications.