In late October, IBM released the findings of an interesting survey it conducted in the spring and summer of 2007 of over 1,200 chief financial officers (CFOs) from 79 countries.

Business process management (BPM) is a concept that has been alive in the IT world for many years under the guise of various names and labels. In the client-server era of the 1990s, BPM tools were called workflow management systems.

Faced with more opportunities for the use of technology than there are resources available for their simultaneous development, organizations are faced with the task of prioritizing or ranking opportunities. Often organizations use a single ranking factor, such as ROI (return on investment).

In the last Advisor (see "Current Offshoring Challenges," 21 November 2007), Phil Zweig examined the results of Cutter's recent survey on offshoring, which found that turnover in offshore staff was identified as a challenge by 30% of the respondents [1]. In his article, Phil makes many good observations about the severity of this issue and why we'd expect it to cause problems for clients.

In the last Advisor (see "Current Offshoring Challenges," 21 November 2007), Phil Zweig examined the results of Cutter's recent survey on offshoring, which found that turnover in offshore staff was identified as a challenge by 30% of the respondents [1]. In his article, Phil makes many good observations about the severity of this issue and why we'd expect it to cause problems for clients.

A friend recently told me that while he understands the principles of agile logically, he is unable to explain it to others. So he asked me to come up with a nontechnical/business metaphor to help him better understand what agile really means. After some thinking, I asked if he remembered playing the game of "gossip" around a campfire as a kid.

As business architecture initiatives continue to take hold, executives are seeking to clarify the role of the business architect. It is important to understand the diversity of roles within core and virtual business architecture teams. Defining these roles will help ensure the successful deployment of business architecture initiatives.

A reader contacted me last week to discuss the concept of business activity monitoring (BAM). This Advisor is based on our conversation.

We all know really good business technology consultants. We also know really bad ones -- or "evil consultants," as I like to describe them.

The accompanying Executive Report focuses on how to foster the growth of internal consultants by examining the process and the skills necessary to become effective internal consultants.

IT organizations with ambitious plans in 2008 to source services, from infrastructure and application maintenance to application software development, must lay the groundwork with senior management for the necessary buy-in. Winning that support requires some understanding of the important predicates to sourcing success.

IT organizations with ambitious plans in 2008 to source services, from infrastructure and application maintenance to application software development, must lay the groundwork with senior management for the necessary buy-in. Winning that support requires some understanding of the important predicates to sourcing success.

This Executive Report by Tanaia Parker introduces the Strategic Enterprise Architecture FrameworkSM (SEAFSM) as an approach to address the strategy-execution dilemma.

The accompanying Executive Report introduces an approach to solving the strategy-execution dilemma plaguing most businesses. This approach leverages the discipline of enterprise architecture (EA) as a tool to execute strategy.

The ability to target specific processes within your organization, change them, and then see those changes quickly reflected in your business systems is no longer a "nice to have" in today's business climate -- it's a "must have." Being tied to a homegrown or aging business system that manages your warehouse or supply chain limits the ability for your systems to rapidly conform to process changes quickly.

This issue of CBR continues our series on innovation and the role of IT in enabling it.

The term "open innovation" emerged just a few years ago from the work of Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, in 2003 [1-3]. In Chesbrough's words, open innovation is:

As Joe discussed in the previous article, Henry Chesbrough is credited with coining the term "open innovation" in his 2003 book of the same name [3]. Chesbrough describes a new model for innovation in which companies look outside their boundaries for ideas and intellectual property (IP) that they can bring inside the firm and at the same time look for opportunities to license their underutilized homegrown IP to other organizations.

This issue of CBR continues our multi-issue focus on innovation, the innovation process, its drivers, and its outcomes. This issue in particular was very interesting to me personally as I had very limited awareness of the open innovation trends developing out there. Despite the existence of established marketplaces of ideas and intellectual property, like most respondents, I was fairly ignorant about this phenomenon.

This survey explored open innovation within enterprises, including the acquisition of intellectual property (IP) from outside the firm and the leveraging of existing IP through commercialization. Thirty-one percent of the 88 respondents hold senior management/policy making or IS/IT management titles, with consulting, software engineering/programming, and project management among the other job titles reported.

In recent years, with much anticipation, we have increasingly been hearing about the Semantic Web, yet it is a term whose definition continues to be rather fuzzy.

Data models, processes, and supporting applications lie at the heart of information architectures and as such are a central component of network-centric environments.

With the Internet and Web-based applications starting to change the way people access and use information and data, semantic technologies have been anticipated as the next paradigm shift for business intelligence.

The BI landscape is shifting gradually to embrace new topic areas and empower new classes of users. Although this has been a gradual evolution, the end result could have revolutionary consequences. Historically, powerful technologies tend to become more widely applied and more readily used over time, with the results often proving unpredictable. Two of the clearest examples from the past century are the personal computer and the Web.

What does it mean to be agile? How do we describe an agile manager or an agile enterprise? What characteristics set apart the agile from the nonagile? Are there people who are more, or less, suited for agile techniques and management?

What does it mean to be agile? How do we describe an agile manager or an agile enterprise? What characteristics set apart the agile from the nonagile? Are there people who are more, or less, suited for agile techniques and management?