As if our current buzzwords had already run their course, or we didn't have enough to last us, a new buzzword has hit the enterprise architecture and application scene. "Applistructure" describes the latest trend to combine enterprise business applications with enterprise infrastructure.

The Cutter Business Technology Council points out that organizations typically change their business focus (and hence their core competencies) over time [1]. The problem is that many decisions to outsource business processes (or parts of those processes) are often made with little thought to what is actually meant by core competency in the context of a particular organization.

Ask any IT professional what phrases spring to mind when you mention "organizational politics," and nine times out of 10 you will get responses such as: Doing deals Scoring points Personal agendas Getting one over on one's colleagues Secrecy and subterfuge Mafia tactics Win-lose

Organizational politics are, however, a fact of corporate life. Organizations, being made up of people, are essentially political institutions.

Last week's service interruption at on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) provider Salesforce.com illustrates the risk that companies assume when they choose to outsource their CRM applications; that hosted applications have all the downtime and security risks of remotely located and managed systems.

There is a great deal of advice available on strategies for implementing new technology and for new methodologies for project management, but effective advice is relatively rare for those many sites with stranded investments in legacy IT systems and their respective support organizations. We see some or all of the following issues again and again in organizations caught in a stranded investment cost trap:

Aging software and hardware with excessive maintenance costs

In a recent Newsweek article about Google (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10296177/site/newsweek/), Eric Schmidt outlined Google's Ten Golden Rules for getting the most out of knowledge workers. Since agile development is really more about mindset and philosophy than specific practices, I found it interesting to analyze Google's rules from an agile perspective.

The service component architecture (SCA) is a new specification created by a group of enterprise software vendors that includes IBM, BEA Systems, Oracle, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Sybase, and Iona Technologies. Although still under development, SCA holds the promise of simplifying application development within the service-oriented architecture (SOA) model.

  What If Your CRM Strategy Were a Mirage? Part 1: The Inherent Limitations of CRM

I was recently working on a major piece of literature, hoping to sell it before the Christmas bills arrive. In the course of my research, I accidentally discovered a peculiarity that annoyed, amused, and inspired me.

In an article "Rankings of Full Time Occupations, By Earnings, 2000" [1], I found several things I didn't expect. The first is stunning: positions 3 through 12 are teachers! They are, in this order: Economics, Physics, Medicine, Law, Natural Sciences, Engineering, Phys Ed, Sociology, Education, and History.

There are two positions held by the supporters and the opponents in the offshoring debate. Generally, supporters of offshoring cite a persuasive list of global business-related advantages that result from offshore outsourcing. Most of the opponents concentrate mainly on the loss of jobs and the loss of technological advantage in the outsourcing country. We will discuss some of the main arguments from each side of the debate.

We began our discussion of the language of money in the first part of this Advisor series (see " The Nimble Project Manager and the Language of Money, Part 1," 1 December 2005). This Advisor recommends ways an agile project manager can best use the language of money.

Here are some holiday gift ideas that dovetail pretty nicely with the trends we're seeing in our business.

10. Let's give Larry Ellison another appearance on Oprah to reprise his "network computer" sales pitch -- the one that fell flat way back when but would fly today. We all know that it's only a matter of time before thin clients rule.

In late November, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown stunned the UK business community by unexpectedly announcing that the long-awaited public company reporting requirement called the Operating Financial Review (OFR) was being abolished. The OFR, scheduled to go into affect in April 2006 after already being postponed a year, was meant to provide shareholders clear, comprehensive, and complete information on the operations and thinking inside UK public companies.

Can the corporate IT R&D function be recast to take on the larger responsibility for business-IT innovation? Although IT R&D as we know it is a useful function, on its own it is unlikely to make much of a business impact, or even to survive until the next business cycle. Consider the following limitations of traditional IT R&D in the context of business-IT innovation:

One area that many EA programs struggle with is demonstrating the value that they bring to an enterprise. A useful way to address this challenge is to think of EA as a service organization; i.e., as providing a service to the enterprise and, in particular, to specific user groups (customers) within the enterprise. To start with this approach, we first identify who the customers are and what service is provided to them.

"Given the appeals court's affirmation of Microsoft's infringement and the favorable resolution of the reexamination, we look forward to quickly dispatching the remaining issues before the district court so that the university and Eolas can be fairly compensated for the use of their property right."

NCR's Teradata data warehousing division has acquired packaged financial performance data warehouse vendor DecisionPoint Software for an undisclosed amount. Teradata plans to integrate DecisionPoint's data warehousing and financial performance management (FPM) technology with the Teradata enterprise data warehouse offering.

The world is far too complicated for humans to get things perfectly right the first time, but humans have a great capacity to tune in, to perfect through feedback, and then to make an adjustment.

One of my favorite writers is Christopher Alexander. Alexander is a maverick architect who has spent the better part of his career criticizing mainstream architecture for concentrating on visually different but sterile buildings and environments. Alexander is a darling of the software community because of his work on "pattern languages."