If you're heard of UML, then you've probably heard comments that it is big, unruly, and complicated, and that things are even worse with UML 2.0. Although I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, I can understand where it's coming from. UML is a general-purpose modeling language, directed at IT systems. Well, IT systems are a big topic area.

We have been working with clients on establishing the project management office (PMO) function and pointing the PMO in the right direction. We have also been making presentations at conferences and at companies on this subject. Two questions often are asked: is the PMO important to achieving business value with projects, and what exactly is the charter for the PMO? Our answers are simple: the PMO is on the front lines of business value, and it plays a critical role in its achievement.

In The World Is Flat , author Thomas Friedman describes how a "connected" world has made it possible to do almost anything collaboratively with people around the planet.

I recently spent an afternoon and evening in a hospital waiting room while my wife was having minor surgery. I observed a few things that applied to supervising people and providing services -- two topics that interest most IT managers.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been the hottest topic in software for the past two or three years, and it looks as though it will continue to enjoy that status for some time to come. Like Java, XML, and Web services, it has attained buzzword superstardom -- membership in that select clique of terms that seem fated to be continuously analyzed and debated by analysts, bloggers, and the media.

The latest acquisition to affect the data warehousing/BI market is IBM's announcement that it is buying real-time data integration specialist DataMirror Corporation for approximately US $161 million.

No sooner have CIOs and IT departments come to terms with the demands of SOA and BPM than they find themselves confronted with a new challenge: Web 2.0. Enthusiasm for this new phenomenon is sweeping the world. It began in the ranks of bloggers, but quickly spread to the technorati, journalists, industry analysts, and would-be trendsetters.

I work with a lot of database and data warehouse practitioners who have a hard time seeing how agile software development practices can be adapted to the complexities of data-centric systems integration and development. Large data volumes, integration of commercial software, disparate systems integration, and so on, make this adaptation a challenging one.

Stakeholder management is a critical component of risk management. If we know the things that our stakeholders value, we have a much clearer sense of what's at risk. However, for many of us, the challenge is identifying the right players and then identifying their true passions associated with our project(s).

If it hasn't happened already, eventually your organization is likely going to be faced with the question: should we use advertising-supported business software?

collaboration = innovation

Just when you thought all the innovative sourcing ideas had been exhausted, an entrepreneur figures out a new way to offer potential value to an arable market while raising his nation's total international trade in services. Success here will remind us of important sourcing truths.

Since the term "Web 2.0" started appearing, the key questions that seem to keep coming back are: What does it mean? What is the relevance to the enterprise? Should we fear it?

As I recently helped update my company's knowledge management strategy (our business vitally depends on the effective transfer of knowledge from experts to novices, but then, what business doesn't?), I realized that leveraging Web 2.0 in the enterprise meant relinquishing traditional control mechanisms over the editing and publishing of corporate knowledge.

BI proponents -- including vendors, analysts, and consultants (myself included) -- have pushed the idea of ubiquitous BI, or "BI for the masses," for years. To date, however, most companies have found the widespread dissemination of BI practices to their more rank-and-file workers an elusive goal.

Companies are starting to direct their attention at how they can better facilitate collaboration among their BI users using so-called Web 2.0 technologies such as instant messaging (IM), wikis, and blogs.

Here are 10 rules I'd like to propose we all follow, starting immediately:

Everything has been said and written about the role of pressure in software development; there's no need to reiterate that all over again. At least, that's what I thought until recently, when an executive called me in for one of those "let's talk frankly" chats.

The responsibility for establishing and maintaining information security today looks like a Scrabble board. COSO, COBIT, ITIL, ISO, and ASIS1 (apologies if I missed any other tiles) are either standards bodies that evangelize practices or acronyms for the management practices themselves -- all designed to help organizations optimize today's information security strategy and contend with tomorrow's threats. Whatever approach an organization adopts, there is one other standard worth considering first.

"Whatever Web 2.0 is, IT executives and technologists need to pay attention to it, and so do the business-unit managers who look for ways to use IT strategically to improve their revenues and shareholder value."

-- Ed Yourdon, Guest Editor, Cutter IT Journal

The business/IT divide is alive and well. We often cast blame on IT for not "talking to the business in a way they can understand," but it's a two-way street and there is plenty of responsibility to be shared for the situation. Business blames IT for a host of sins. Recently, I heard: "They can't do what we ask ... everything takes too long ...

Ah, the word "politics" sounds ugly. Yet IT managers always talk about the negative role of politics in making IT investment and prioritization decisions. It would seem that "politics" is something to be avoided, that somehow a more rational decision-making approach could avoid politics.

In helping the founder get a local technology professional organization to take flight, I began to think about some broad themes around the business value of IT that would seed discussions in future meetings among the like-minded folk who populate this informal group. Thinking about business value topics made me realize how useful this exercise is in establishing better alignment between IT and business units.

In the next few Advisors, I'll address some complex rights your organization will want to consider in outsourcing contracts, as well as the obligations you may wish to require of a service provider. Each of these entails having a separate schedule in your outsourcing contract in addition to clauses within the contract.

In this series of Advisors, we're examining the use of schedules as an approach to contract design that enables you to modularly construct contracts; you only use the schedules you need in any given circumstance. This approach also allows for third parties that may need to sign the schedules to have only the information they require.

The title of this article sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it? But it is becoming a reality in some countries in the EU: research, development, and innovation (RDI) standards defined for innovation management systems and innovation projects {1}. The question is: will an RDI certification stimulate and support organizations in achieving systematic and sustained innovation? Or will the routines that they promote be another obstacle to innovation if bureaucratic and "audit-type" controls are introduced?