Subaru of America is a master car distributor responsible for the importation and distribution of Subaru cars throughout the US. It is based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with an assembly plant in Indiana and various distributors across the country.

If you spend serious money with a vendor, here are five things you should expect.

NCR Teradata announced it is buying supply chain analytics application vendor SeeCommerce for an undisclosed amount. Teradata will use SeeCommerce's packaged supply chain intelligence (SCI) applications to bolster its Teradata Demand and Supply Chain offerings.

SeeCommerce offers SeeChain -- a packaged SCI application, whose various modules cover a range of supply chain domains and processes, including:

It should come as no surprise to anyone in the IT world that old concepts often reemerge under new, more mysterious sounding titles. Navigating the world of IT is like taking a trip through a bowl of alphabet soup. But while the names and terminology may change, the core concepts usually stay the same.

IT moves in a perpetual continuum. Themes recur throughout time, reemerging with different titles and small changes. To anyone who has been in the IT world for any length of time, it should come as no surprise that the care and treatment of corporate assets should include a place for the corporate data. For ages, enterprises have stored vast quantities of data gathered from operational and back-office systems.

The growing acceptance of the Lean/Agile Development 1 model presents a number of challenges for project management. The values, models, tools, and structure of radical models of project management to support agile development have been well documented in books such as Radical Project Management [12], Managing Agile Projects [1], and Agile Project Management [4], as well as in Cutter's Agile Project Management practice.

There seems to be a mantra in many agile development organizations that the shorter the iteration, the more agile the team. While I believe strongly in short iterations (on the order of one to four weeks), sometimes the "shorter is better" mantra gets in the way of progress. It may also be a symptom of a process being too developer centric.

Here are some questions we need to ask about stakeholder value. How can we determine the overall value of a system? How is this value related to the performance characteristics of the system? How can we engineer the value to meet stakeholder expectations? How can we test and measure the real value? Can we contract for system payment by value, or do we have to restrict ourselves to payment for performance levels? Is there any way to quantify the overall value of a system as a function of a set of system attributes?

Although practitioners from both camps still tend to view them as separate -- yet complementary -- in truth, business rules management (BRM) and business process management (BPM) technologies are becoming more and more intertwined. This is due to the fact that BRM technology aligns very well with process optimization -- in particular, for automating repeatable decisions as part of some process or business activity.

Evaluating an IT project once it is completed is one of those activities that everyone recognizes as necessary but few organizations approach methodically. Post-project fatigue and pressures to redeploy resources make retrospection into what went right or wrong seem like an expendable activity. Yet organizational learning in the effective application and use of IT requires that IT projects be evaluated for their effectiveness as well as their contribution to business value.

Any doubt about where the market for business intelligence (BI) and data management is heading was shattered by IBM's recent announcement that it is launching a company-wide initiative that will invest US $1 billion over the next three years to expand its information management software and services offerings.

Any doubt about where the market for business intelligence (BI) and data management is heading was shattered by IBM's recent announcement that it is launching a company-wide initiative that will invest US $1 billion over the next three years to expand its information management software and services offerings.

The firm, as we have known it, is dying. A new one is emerging. The firm, as we will come to know it, is embedded in the ontology of service-oriented architecture (SOA). We stand today in the murky waters between these two states, and as is often the case, confusion confounds things. As we learned in school, the old firm rose with the birth of industrialism, was strengthened with the structures of modernism, and came to maturity with computing. We have grown comfortable with this genesis. But now, something is afoot inside us.

In recent years, application developers have pioneered techniques that enable them to work in an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) manner, and now we're going one step further with agile methods that are also highly collaborative. Unfortunately, many data professionals are still mired in the traditional, serial approaches of the late 1970s and 1980s. As a result, they're discovering that they need to play catch-up if they're to remain relevant within the new environment.

In my last Advisor (see "Service Component Architecture," 1 February 2006, I introduced the service component architecture (SCA), a new joint industry specification that decouples the implementation of services from their assembly of components. This week's Advisor is about a special type of component: the Service Data Object (SDO), which complements SCA by providing a common way to access different kinds of data.