A successful business intelligence (BI) outsourcing strategy requires a clear understanding of the value proposition. A benefits analysis to assess the gains of outsourcing should include the value of coming "online" more quickly with a new BI application; the cost saved by not having to build and maintain inhouse BI expertise; and the value inherent in the vendors' experience and ability to avoid perils and pitfalls.

A successful business intelligence (BI) outsourcing strategy requires a clear understanding of the value proposition. A benefits analysis to assess the gains of outsourcing should include the value of coming "online" more quickly with a new BI application; the cost saved by not having to build and maintain inhouse BI expertise; and the value inherent in the vendors' experience and ability to avoid perils and pitfalls.

Information architectures are increasingly misaligned with business architectures while becoming less adaptive to new products, services, markets, and customer requirements. A steady drumbeat of failed projects, some that are publicized and some that are not, has executives rethinking failed policies of the past. Wholesale replacement projects and package deployment initiatives have poor track records while integration tools have created a maze of redundancies wrapped around already convoluted architectures.

In my previous Advisor (see "The Mythical Business Case -- Part 1: The Limits of Rational Decisions," 8 March 2006), I presented the not-so-uncommon phenomenon of tweaking formal business case analysis to fit (rather than prove) the IT investment decisions that have already been made.

Reputation is a major corporate asset that is often valued much more than the tangible assets of the corporation itself. Buying a corporation's reputation is as important a consideration as buying its assets. When Phillip Morris bought Kraft Foods for US $13.1 billion, it wanted Kraft's reputation and was willing to pay four times Kraft's physical assets to get it.

Last week, Microsoft acquired BI analysis and visualization vendor ProClarity Corporation. Financial terms were not revealed. However, this deal is important because it significantly bolsters Microsoft's already considerable BI technology stack with an intuitive and comprehensive analytic, visualization, and reporting platform already tailor-made for the Microsoft product line.

One critical issue that arises in the move to agile methods is organization. Since some of these issues differ between product organizations (such as software ISVs) and IT organizations, I will discuss some general guidelines and then how they apply to each type of organization. This first Advisor on agile organizations will focus on the first guideline (of the six outlined below) of empowered customer-facing teams.

"The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either." This quote from Ben Franklin came to mind as I sat bemused while trying to outwardly show some sympathy to my government colleague as he attempted to log on to his agency's network. Some 30-plus minutes later, he was able to log in. Next came the process of asking the network for permission to start checking for his e-mail. This is always an adventure as well, since this activity might take another 30 minutes to complete.

"The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either." This quote from Ben Franklin came to mind as I sat bemused while trying to outwardly show some sympathy to my government colleague as he attempted to log on to his agency's network. Some 30-plus minutes later, he was able to log in. Next came the process of asking the network for permission to start checking for his e-mail. This is always an adventure as well, since this activity might take another 30 minutes to complete.

My last three Trends Advisors in this series (see "Real Enterprise Data Architecture, Parts 1, 2, and 3," 23 February, 9 March, and 30 March 2006) have been about enterprise data architecture.

My last three Trends Advisors in this series (see "Real Enterprise Data Architecture, Parts 1, 2, and 3," 23 February, 9 March, and 30 March 2006) have been about enterprise data architecture.

All around the world, corporations are turning to open source software (OSS) for a number of compelling reasons. In Europe, for instance, financial services companies have been moving to Linux because of its superior price/performance, hardware-neutrality, reliability, and vendor independence. Companies like AtosEuronext, Banco Popolare di Milano, LVM Insurance, and Reuters Group have migrated important server-side operations to Linux with remarkably successful results.

This third and final Advisor in a series of articles on post-project evaluations focuses on the second of the two main components of post-project evaluations: assessing the business impact of an IT investment (see "Post-Project Evaluations, Part 1: Overview," 22 February 2006 and "Post-Project Evaluations, Part 2: Assessing Project Performance," 15 March 2006).

Technology and business conditions are creating an environment that favors rapid response, collaboration, and loosely knit modular organization. This trend can be seen at all levels, from the supply of individual contract labor up to "constellations" of enterprises brought together for a common purpose.

Technology and business conditions are creating an environment that favors rapid response, collaboration, and loosely knit modular organization. This trend can be seen at all levels, from the supply of individual contract labor up to "constellations" of enterprises brought together for a common purpose.

Technology and business conditions are creating an environment that favors rapid response, collaboration, and loosely knit modular organization. This trend can be seen at all levels, from the supply of individual contract labor up to "constellations" of enterprises brought together for a common purpose.

Sadly, I believe that the data management (DM) community has fallen down when it comes to ensuring data quality within the vast majority of organizations. Yes, these people talk the talk, but they don't seem to walk it. They claim that data quality is important, and they're right about that. They also claim that they should be responsible for ensuring data quality, which also seems fair. But, as we can see by the myriad data challenges faced within most organizations, their vision begins to fail.

[This week I address two issues. In the first part, I consider what makes up customer relationship management (CRM). Second, I offer a correction to last week's article that covered the new Oracle BI Suite offerings.]

Free and open source software (F/OSS) is now acknowledged as an important contributor to the global software industry. Although Linux -- probably the most widely recognized F/OSS brand -- has so far attained only about 10% of the worldwide server market, a handful of F/OSS packages have quietly overtaken the market leaders in their respective segments.

I teach a course to graduating seniors at the University of North Carolina on IT planning and management. We recently finished the course segment on understanding the current state of IT and had begun the segment on developing an IT strategy. I was talking about the usefulness of creating a vision of the future state of IT for this purpose, when a student asked me what the difference was between a vision and a goal.

In the last few years, all of us in the IT industry, and many of the general public, have come to accept free and open source software (F/OSS) as a fact of life. While some of its more esoteric aspects -- such as the precise distinction between free software and OSS or the enchanted world of F/OSS licensing -- are little understood, most of us could reel off half a dozen or so F/OSS packages.

Since this is the halfway point of my tenure as editor of Cutter Benchmark Review, I thought this would be a good time to give you, our readers, a tour of our production process. When preparing for a new issue, we typically start by looking at the set of Cutter Online Resource Centers and, trying to balance our coverage of topics amongst them, formulate ideas about what you, our readers, would most value: knowledge management, security, privacy, new IT trends, IT innovation (next issue), and so on.

Content management systems (CMS) have been evolving very quickly in recent years for a number of reasons.

The process of selecting a content management system (CMS) presents many challenges for an organization. A CMS provides critical tools for how individuals create, share, and use content, thus enabling users to communicate and work more effectively. Any organization that requires knowledge workers should consider a system to reduce the effort of content creation or improve the results of sharing content. However, CMS projects often cost too much, take too long to deliver, and fail to meet users' needs. Why is selecting and implementing a CMS so difficult?

As this issue marks the midpoint in my tenure as CBR editor, I thought it was a good time to acknowledge the people who every month make CBR happen: Cindy, who has the thankless job of keeping us all in line; Karen and Anne, with their invaluable guidance; and Pam and Linda, who every month apply their editing and formatting magic.