"Visibility": Now, there's a term you haven't heard lately. I'm kidding, of course; these days it's all we in the IT field hear about. There's visibility into your financial data, your inventory data, your purchasing data -- everybody wants a clear view into what's going on in the company. It may be the single largest value proposition IT offers.

At the Aberdeen Group Supply Chain Management Summit last month in Boston, for example, more than half of the 170 supply chain, financial and IT executives cited visibility initiatives as their top supply chain enhancement for 2007 (the next most popular answer, risk management, was cited by just 21% of the audience). Various technologies create this visibility, such as global logistics hubs that aggregate procurement and transportation data, then layer on analytics to present information in a scorecard format. Of course, ensuring common data definitions throughout the supply chain is at least as big a nightmare as in other parts of the enterprise, considering the number of partners that touch a given product from inception through delivery. That's one reason these projects are still on many companies' to-do lists.

And they're just one piece of the product puzzle for companies that produce or sell various types of goods. The engineering, design and product data management information on any SKU is a whole other data set that ideally you'd centralize and make accessible across your company and business partners.