The subtitle of Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck's groundbreaking book, is "Embrace Change." The full range of behaviors that this seemingly simple phrase can be affect are in fact very far-reaching.

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One CAN'T believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One CAN'T believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One CAN'T believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

In the current edition of Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (CACM), there is an extremely important article for everyone involved in mission-critical software. The article is titled "Software Engineering and Formal Methods" and is written by a number of illustrious software scientists.

In the current edition of Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (CACM), there is an extremely important article for everyone involved in mission-critical software. The article is titled "Software Engineering and Formal Methods" and is written by a number of illustrious software scientists.

Compared to home-location development teams that may be colocated with domain experts and business champions, software developers at the (offshore) work location are not likely to be familiar with your business. They are learning the details of the business as they code up the application. Even with well-written requirements documentation, don't assume that the team will understand what should be built. Furthermore, intricate business rules and relationships among data elements can be particularly hard to convey.

Compared to home-location development teams that may be colocated with domain experts and business champions, software developers at the (offshore) work location are not likely to be familiar with your business. They are learning the details of the business as they code up the application. Even with well-written requirements documentation, don't assume that the team will understand what should be built. Furthermore, intricate business rules and relationships among data elements can be particularly hard to convey.

With an almost evangelical fervor surrounding it, the steady flow of rhetoric concerning alignment of IT with the business side of the organization assumes that if the IT organization pushes for it, business units will enthusiastically embrace it. Often this is not true, and IT managers must prepare for those occasions when the technology organization is truly ready to transform how it interacts with business units when everyone else isn't.

With all the discussions of "levels of abstraction" in the systems modeling literature, there has not been enough discussion of what kind of abstraction those of us involved in enterprise architecture (EA) should be doing.

We're hearing increasingly about the use of Web 2.0 techniques -- including mashups, social networks, wikis, blogs, maps, and search -- with BI. There have also been several interesting developments recently regarding Web 2.0 and BI.

Customer collaboration is a cornerstone of agile development, but it is also one of the more difficult aspects of implementing agile. Of course, lack of customer involvement isn't unique to agile development -- software developers have had problems in this area ever since software entered organizational life.

Business and art are two -- or some would argue, the -- primary sites where innovation happens in our societies. They are, however, also structurally ordered into a dichotomy that often has business on the "useful" side and art on the "amusement" side.

Business and art are two -- or some would argue, the -- primary sites where innovation happens in our societies. They are, however, also structurally ordered into a dichotomy that often has business on the "useful" side and art on the "amusement" side.

"Many project managers [PMs] still find the complexity of planning and delivering projects in a constantly changing environment often requires competencies that their formal training has not equipped them with," notes Guest Editor Rob Thomsett, in the May 2008 Cutter IT Journal issue's call for papers.

While often the "Green Revolution" in IT consists of well-intentioned projects to minimize damage to the environment, a darkening trend in the data center could transform fluffy and fuzzy corporate environmental attitudes into a more focused, bottom-line disposition where energy strategy becomes a key component of disciplined IT management.

While often the "Green Revolution" in IT consists of well-intentioned projects to minimize damage to the environment, a darkening trend in the data center could transform fluffy and fuzzy corporate environmental attitudes into a more focused, bottom-line disposition where energy strategy becomes a key component of disciplined IT management.

Last month, we wrote an Advisor titled "Is Our IT Superior to the Competition's? No???" It was triggered by the just-published Cutter Benchmark Review article (see "Linking IT Budgeting, Governance, and Value," Vol. 8, No. 7), in which we report that only 27% of managers of large companies believe their IT is superior to that of their competition.

As enterprise architects, we often face tasks aligning business and IT. One approach to this alignment is characterized by the Parker-Benson Square Wheel. It tells us that there are two sides to this equation. IT aligns technology with the business by responding to changes in business strategy and operations. This is the traditional role of IT.

There have been a number of developments over the past few months involving open source data integration platforms. One of the most interesting of these is Talend's open source data quality suite. Another is the version 2.0 release of Jitterbit's open source data integration toolset.

When I've been involved with clients trying to establish an EA function, they usually fall into one of two categories: either they basically have no architecture occurring at the enterprise level, or they have a fairly new practice in place with a handful of people having some amount of experience and/or knowledge of architecture.

Organizations seeking to raise their quality of IT management might consider the concept of the business services catalog, a centralized electronic compendium of administrative and application services that helps employees get work done. The services catalog concept is a process requirement of the IT Infrastructure Library V3 (ITIL V3).

The inclusion of the services catalog concept in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology is not just the best place to begin methodology implementation but also represents a potent approach to IT management improvements for organizations in desperate need of them.

A large amount of information is available describing the potential benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as well as the best practices, architecture guidelines, and design patterns to achieve them. However, putting SOA to the test in a real-world project always provides the most valuable insights.

A large amount of information is available describing the potential benefits of SOA as well as the best practices, architectural guidelines, and design patterns to achieve them. However, putting SOA to the test in a real-world project always provides the most valuable insights. The accompanying Executive Report discusses a case study based on a project that was conducted for one of the world's leading chauffeured services companies.