The past five years have seen a significant trend toward the corporate outsourcing and offshoring of both business operations and specific workforce skills. Now more than ever, companies are viewing these as viable options for improving cost containment, productivity, quality of service, ROI, and so on. As IT organizations consider outsourcing, hosting, and ASP models to manage mainline programs and projects, there is discussion about whether or not to outsource business intelligence (BI) programs as well.

Developing an IT strategic plan is like quitting smoking: it's easy -- people do it all the time. What's tough is sticking to it. All too common are recollections of plans gone by:

What's your standard for risk?

What's your standard for risk?

Henry Ford may have given us the inexpensive automobile but Alfred Sloan gave us the model year. Ford believed that mass production was based on making millions of one standardized product. Sloan, on the other hand, believed that mass consumerism was based on changing automobile styles every year so that people would be tempted (encouraged) to buy a new car every few years rather than every decade. This was called style-based (or marketing-based) obsolescence.

Henry Ford may have given us the inexpensive automobile but Alfred Sloan gave us the model year. Ford believed that mass production was based on making millions of one standardized product. Sloan, on the other hand, believed that mass consumerism was based on changing automobile styles every year so that people would be tempted (encouraged) to buy a new car every few years rather than every decade. This was called style-based (or marketing-based) obsolescence.

Amidst the tangle and bustle of ERP, CRM, NAS, SAN, CAS, and NSF, I have found a new acronym right down the block from where HSM used to live (I grew up with DFHSM; we don't talk about the DF part). ILM 's the name of the new acronym. Pronounced eye-el-em, not "ilm" (perish the thought): information lifecycle management.

I recently sat through a 32-slide PowerPoint presentation (about 14 slides too many) on a vendor's view of ILM. I'll save you the time by giving you the quick version.

The first step toward successful outsourcing is identifying the type of outsourcing model that best fits the organization's objectives. Most enterprises fail to recognize this, or at best, tend to take a one-size-fits-all approach. As a result, many of these engagements begin with mismatched management expectations and a relatively high risk of failure.

The first step toward successful outsourcing is identifying the type of outsourcing model that best fits the organization's objectives. Most enterprises fail to recognize this, or at best, tend to take a one-size-fits-all approach. As a result, many of these engagements begin with mismatched management expectations and a relatively high risk of failure.

In last week's Advisor, I said that outside of academia, the life sciences, and financial services, practical grid business applications are mostly rare, and that the biggest reason for this is a lack of standards and best practices for implementation. I added that although these are now under development, I did not see companies stampeding to implement grid-computing architectures in 2006 (see " My Thoughts on BI Trends for 2006," 3 January 2006).

Everyone wants new management offices. It seems that a preferred response to management problems of many kinds is to create a new office responsible for something fairly specific. The ones that come immediately to mind are project management offices (PMOs), process management offices (PMOs again -- causing, of course, some confusion among the acronym crowd), and vendor management offices (VMOs). What are these offices, and who are these people? And why are there so many of them?

Test-driven development was developed by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Kent Beck, one of the founding fathers of Extreme Programming (XP). Beck is also the inventor of the xUnit family of automated unit testing utilities and author of Test-Driven Development: By Example [1], which highlights both TDD and JUnit.

The year 2005 was an interesting one from an enterprise risk management and governance (ERM&G) perspective. Before we launch into 2006, let's take a quick look back at some of the subjects of last year's ERM&G Advisors.

The year 2005 was an interesting one from an enterprise risk management and governance (ERM&G) perspective. Before we launch into 2006, let's take a quick look back at some of the subjects of last year's ERM&G Advisors.

So where are we now?