Just when I was beginning to think that the market's view of Google is far too optimistic, the company does something really smart: this time Google bought a company called @Last Software, which makes a product called SketchUp. This is quite a coincidence, since for the past five or six months, I've been telling all my friends that they really need to look at SketchUp because it is one of the slickest products I've seen for a long, long time with one of the most inventive user interfaces I've ever seen.

This Advisor is the fourth in a series on agile integration and the first on process (see Agile Integration -- Assembling a Team, 13 April 2006, Agile Integration -- Making Agile Work in Organizations, 2 March 2006, and Agile Integration -- Organization and Empowered Teams, 6 April 2006).

Many organizations have a policy for fixed assets; however, this policy is driven usually from an accounting perspective, not from the perspective of the operational risks associated with these assets. Controlling the organization's IT assets requires an operational framework that complements the accounting-based, fixed-asset policy.

Many organizations have a policy for fixed assets; however, this policy is driven usually from an accounting perspective, not from the perspective of the operational risks associated with these assets. Controlling the organization's IT assets requires an operational framework that complements the accounting-based, fixed-asset policy.

A Google search of the phrase "achieve an ROI of" returns a sea of URLS from IT vendors promising that an investment in their product means a return on investment. As organizations grew more conscious of the need to fold the language of finance and profit into IT investment assessment, it was predictable that vendors would adopt the language of economic value into their sales and marketing efforts. Are these claims more than rhetoric?

A Google search of the phrase "achieve an ROI of" returns a sea of URLS from IT vendors promising that an investment in their product means a return on investment. As organizations grew more conscious of the need to fold the language of finance and profit into IT investment assessment, it was predictable that vendors would adopt the language of economic value into their sales and marketing efforts. Are these claims more than rhetoric?

There have been a lot of "studies" on job migration and outsourcing over the past five years that try to position outsourcing as something political: outsourcing creates jobs; outsourcing is the inevitable consequence of globalization; outsourcing will destroy the US labor force. But what's really going on? How do we avoid the spin that proponents and critics of outsourcing present every time the topic comes up?

There have been a lot of "studies" on job migration and outsourcing over the past five years that try to position outsourcing as something political: outsourcing creates jobs; outsourcing is the inevitable consequence of globalization; outsourcing will destroy the US labor force. But what's really going on? How do we avoid the spin that proponents and critics of outsourcing present every time the topic comes up?

I've seen a lot of press lately about the relationship between business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Products are now claiming to support the "convergence of BPM and SOA technologies." There have been major announcements this year of BPM products being acquired by SOA vendors, such as the purchase of Collaxa by Oracle and the recent purchase of Fuego by BEA. There have also been announcements of new product sets following previous acquisitions.

Over the years, I've had the pleasure of working in a range of IT organizations around the world, and I've often worked with, or at least reviewed, many of the enterprise architecture (EA) teams within those organizations. In all cases, the EA team is staffed with some of the best and brightest within IT, all of whom have the organization's best interests at heart.

The latest announcement by open source reporting tools vendor JasperSoft that it has a new business intelligence (BI) server designed to make it easier for corporate and commercial software developers to build reporting environments got me thinking the other day about the extent to which organizations are actually embracing open source BI tools.

The latest announcement by open source reporting tools vendor JasperSoft that it has a new business intelligence (BI) server designed to make it easier for corporate and commercial software developers to build reporting environments got me thinking the other day about the extent to which organizations are actually embracing open source BI tools.

In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we focus on a topic that is dear to my heart and to that of many IT professionals I know: innovation in IT departments.

In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we focus on a topic that is dear to my heart and to that of many IT professionals I know: innovation in IT departments.

INTRODUCTION

In our recent survey, we asked people to tell us about a particular instance of their use of IT as a tool for, and a source of, innovation in their business. In his article, George describes and interprets these data as they give us specific insights into the shape and vigor of IT innovation in the real world. I'm taking a somewhat more distant view, rearing back a bit for a glimpse of the whole. I'm looking more at questions raised than at answers presented.

In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we focus on IT innovation. Our contributors this month are George Westerman, a research scientist with MIT's Center for Information Systems Research (CISR); and Lee Devin, Professor of Theater Emeritus at Swarthmore College and author on the subject of innovation.

This survey examined the nature of IT innovations in 105 organizations, 58% of which are headquartered in North America; of the remainder, 15% are headquartered in Europe, 11% in Asia, 7% in Australia/Pacific, and 6% in South America. Twenty-five percent of responding organizations have annual revenues of more than US $1 billion, with 21% having annual revenues between $100 million and $1 billion, 19% between $10 million and $100 million, and 35% less than $10 million. Annual IT budgets ranged from under $100,000 (12%) to more than $100 million (15%).

Business is increasingly moving toward a marketplace model, which is in sharp contrast to the traditional view of an organization as a production line. In this new world, organizations collaborate together, consuming and offering services to maximize efficiency, better serve customers, and achieve long-term advantage. This is the world of service orientation in which simply automating business activities in software is no longer sufficient; software must be agile enough to cope with change and foster innovation.

Business is increasingly moving toward a marketplace model. This model is in sharp contrast to the traditional view of an organization as a production line. In this new world, organizations collaborate together, consuming and offering services to maximize efficiency, better serve customers, and achieve long-term advantage. This is the world of service orientation, in which business is increasingly less supported by software and more enabled by it.

With a stronger allegiance to and identity with technology more so than their employing companies, IT employees are perhaps the ultimate example of a prima donna knowledge workforce. Deeply technical, always changing, usually idiosyncratic, and almost always beyond the ken of business folks, IT knowledge is at a premium.

A large part of the IT community today seems to be busy applying the principles of service orientation in software product development efforts. What started as a specific programming technique and architectural principle later evolved into a philosophy of taming the complexity of enterprise IT by turning it into a heap of interchangeable, standardized "software LEGO bricks" and finally has become a fashionable concept used in IT marketing.

In the midst of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) hype, there is a critical need to navigate corporate IT between the threats of overpromise and underdelivery.

More than anything else, Windows stands or falls by its graphical user interface (GUI) -- which, with the advent of animation, video, audio, and other refinements, is rapidly turning into a multimedia user interface. That is why, ever since Windows 1.0, Microsoft has made the quality of the "user experience" a high priority.