My new smart, stylish, cool PDA is a pain in the neck to actually use. There are so many features embedded in so many more -- these people have perfected hierarchical menus to everywhere -- that I find it nearly impossible to optimize its performance. There are also way too many decisions for me to make: do I really need 50 ring/vibrate combinations (not to mention the six-gazillion I can download)?

I was recently rereading one of my earliest e-mail Advisors from this Agile Project Management Practice (it was actually e-Project management then). The Advisor was about why this different way of managing projects was so important. After reading it, I decided it was time to revisit and update that issue.

With disaster recovery, 9/11, the war on terror, Sarbanes-Oxley, OMB 300, and a host of other influences, there are very few businesses that have escaped the risk experience. Virtually to a one, businesses are taking on the mantle of risk managers in a forceful, overt fashion. It is not universally because they have seen the error of their ways and suddenly recognize that risk management is a practice that adds value to their shareholders.

With disaster recovery, 9/11, the war on terror, Sarbanes-Oxley, OMB 300, and a host of other influences, there are very few businesses that have escaped the risk experience. Virtually to a one, businesses are taking on the mantle of risk managers in a forceful, overt fashion. It is not universally because they have seen the error of their ways and suddenly recognize that risk management is a practice that adds value to their shareholders.

I was recently rereading one of my earliest e-mail Advisors from this Agile Project Management Practice (it was actually e-Project management then). The Advisor was about why this different way of managing projects was so important. After reading it, I decided it was time to revisit and update that issue.

In this Advisor, I would like to address the "people" component of getting your organization ready for smart sourcing, pointing out specific situations I have observed in my recent engagements with large and medium business clients. My reasons behind starting with the "people" component are twofold.

In this Advisor, I would like to address the "people" component of getting your organization ready for smart sourcing, pointing out specific situations I have observed in my recent engagements with large and medium business clients. My reasons behind starting with the "people" component are twofold.

There's been a lot of activity in the past few months around SOA standards. For example:

We've discussed SCA, SDO, Open SOA, and OASIS in previous Advisors this year. This week, I'll turn my attention to the UML Profile.

Senior leadership is often interested in identifying estimated costs before they approve any business-IT alignment or related projects. In some cases, the exercise of investigating the costs involve rigorous and meticulous due diligence as well as arduous cost/benefits analyses. In other cases, as assigned teams, we have used prior experience, calculated guesswork, and a combination of high-level estimation of the tasks involved to come up with the numbers.

To think that because you employ an agile methodology you don't need to bother with requirements is simply wrong. Regardless of what methodology you choose for development, you need to know what it is you're building before you start building. To do otherwise is asking for trouble.

At the heart of attaining strategic alignment is identifying and pursuing those initiatives, projects, and programs that best support or enable the organization's goals and objectives.

As organizations carry out their business performance management initiatives, they are increasingly finding it necessary to provide their metrics, scorecards, and other analytics with access to current data from operational systems. The trouble is, the quality of this real-time operational data is suspect. This is because operational data sources rarely go through the rigorous cleansing processes routinely applied to sourced data before it is loaded into the organization's traditional (i.e., ETL-based) data warehouses and data marts.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

-- General Dwight D. Eisenhower

I am fascinated by the continued conversations about EA's return on investment. They are especially exciting when we're actually able to conjure up tangible cost-saving projections to justify our investment in EA.

The challenge for the typical IT department has been to demonstrate that it is delivering real benefits from the organization's investment in information technology. The organization's executive management, from its point of view, has been increasing the amount of spending on information technology year-on-year with little or no tangible benefits.

In recent years, there have been a number of publications by industry luminaries regarding business transformation, execution, and innovation. In reality, each of these concepts plays a significant role in delivering tangible business values -- and must be connected with a common foundation that can link the associated business processes of the company.

What do you do when things go wrong? It's a fair question, and a good one to ask in almost any situation. That is because many plans, methods, and processes often break down when things don't go smoothly. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a well-thought-out plan or a good process is how well it survives when severe problems arise.

The November 2006 US elections in which Democrats were chosen to lead both the House of Representatives and the Senate will likely generate increased attention on the need to alter public policy to spur greater security of the nation's IT systems.

The November 2006 US elections in which Democrats were chosen to lead both the House of Representatives and the Senate will likely generate increased attention on the need to alter public policy to spur greater security of the nation's IT systems.

One of the many burdens of aging must include the ever-expanding accumulation of possessions that seem to defy easy classification for orderly storage and retrieval; you know you have too much stuff when you own something but can't find it, despite concerted efforts to organize items with easy access in mind. And so it has become with information. Today's desktop hard drive is a kind of family basement -- a repository of things ranging from the consistently useful to those which over time grow stale, esoteric, and useless.

One of the many burdens of aging must include the ever-expanding accumulation of possessions that seem to defy easy classification for orderly storage and retrieval; you know you have too much stuff when you own something but can't find it, despite concerted efforts to organize items with easy access in mind. And so it has become with information. Today's desktop hard drive is a kind of family basement -- a repository of things ranging from the consistently useful to those which over time grow stale, esoteric, and useless.

One of the many burdens of aging must include the ever-expanding accumulation of possessions that seem to defy easy classification for orderly storage and retrieval; you know you have too much stuff when you own something but can't find it, despite concerted efforts to organize items with easy access in mind. And so it has become with information. Today's desktop hard drive is a kind of family basement -- a repository of things ranging from the consistently useful to those which over time grow stale, esoteric, and useless.

A friend of mine was discussing a large custom system that his organization was in the process of acquiring. "The vendor is recommending that we use a code-generator that they have developed to handle the complex stuff in a Java environment. I wonder whether this is going to work out any differently than the CASE stuff that we did in the late 1980s and early 1990s?"

"Why do you think the vendor is going this way?" I asked.

In my last Advisor (Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 5: Why Project Teams Are Easier to Build Than Management Teams, 9 November 2006), I told you that project teams are the most straight-forward teams in which to develop high-performance dynamics because they fit the classic laboratory definition of a team.

One of the biggest information security decisionmaking challenges is finding economic value data that makes an ROI calculation for a security investment useful. Unfortunately, no magic bullet exists to resolve the problem, but a couple of stand-in approaches to the exploration of value might help.

Any manager knows that demonstrating the ROI of information security products is problematic at best. One of the biggest challenges is coming up with baseline data against which to measure a performance improvement and therefore value.

One of the biggest information security decisionmaking challenges is finding economic value data that makes an ROI calculation for a security investment useful. Unfortunately, no magic bullet exists to resolve the problem, but a couple of stand-in approaches to the exploration of value might help.

Any manager knows that demonstrating the ROI of information security products is problematic at best. One of the biggest challenges is coming up with baseline data against which to measure a performance improvement and therefore value.