The first view of outsourcing contracts argues that the contract is the most important part in the client-vendor relationship. The second view, while far from advocating that a contract is unnecessary, places its importance significantly beneath that of the relationship. The contract has its place, but it alone cannot produce results. An experienced contract-management team focused on cooperation, common interests, and earning trust over time creates the results and efficiencies. A mere piece of paper cannot achieve such results.

Last week, it was in the news that a Pacific Gas & Electric executive admitted to having used an assumed name to infiltrate an online discussion group organized by consumers who are against the deployment of the utility company's smart electricity-usage metering devices. The executive indicated that his goal was simply to get a better understanding of what his company's customers are thinking.

Technical innovation is widely viewed in the developed and developing world as the driver for economic and cultural growth and prosperity. The growth of network services and social media have made new innovation processes feasible, and the members of the next generation of knowledge workers often have been among the leaders in such approaches.

Every good manager knows statistical data is always subject to interpretation. A poor interpretation could be disastrous. For some time, my attention has been drawn to how frequently Standish Chaos Reports are used and how almost nobody who uses or refers to the data remarks on their inadequacy.

On the recent Apple investor call, CEO Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea for the superior usability of the single-vendor Apple products, contrasting its usability with Google's many-hardware-devices mobile experience. Jobs critiqued the use of the word "open," which Google uses to describe its platform.

Thus far in this series ("Part I: Basic Concepts," 15 September 2010; "Part II: Let's Get Critical, 13 October 2010), we

For years now, I have made a good living by exploiting Geary Rummler and Alan Brache’s famous subtitle, "How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart" (Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Ch

A recent Cutter Consortium survey [1] helps shed some light on the effect that the economic downturn is having on corporate BI and data warehousing efforts. The good news is that the impact appears to have lessened, as more organizations report that the economy is no longer having a significant negative effect on their BI and data warehousing initiatives.

Fundamentally, agile business is about a dedicated and unremitting focus on two principles:

Back in March, I wrote an Advisor describing how the lack of a safety culture contributed to the fatal collision of two Washington, DC, subway trains in June 2009.1 Consequently, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) management promised that it would be taking ste

Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.

-- Thomas A. Edison

Having spent time as an executive in a large company, and having spent most of my career helping executives work on strategic problems, I have to say that I don't believe that companies set out to alienate customers. But I do believe that many don't know or don't realize the extent to which customers are angered by poor customer service.

The brand of architects is under siege. One tribal elder of EA, a recognized giant in the community, commented after hours at an industry gathering, "I am ashamed of what has happened to this profession." Architects, while some of the smartest and hardest-working people in the enterprise, are among the least understood and appreciated. The nature of the architecture exercise is not hero making. The payback from EA is not instantaneous. Architects must be smart and work in organizations that are smart -- not necessarily the norm. But there is hope.

While the number of players involved in the delivery of mobile applications and services is large, the ultimate responsibility for security protection rests with the organization that does not want its reputation to be damaged by "whomever" of the players in the mobile value chain -- be it the equipment manufacturer, the network provider, the application vendor, or the end user/employee of the organization.

Organizations of all shapes and sizes are seriously considering the virtual desktop infrastructure model to support their client computing needs. However, the majority of them are still somewhere between the investigation stage and trying out pilot projects.

While making predictions for the new year last December, I said that it would become more practical for end-user organizations to take advantage of social BI in 2010, because BI vendors would increase their efforts to add to their platforms social media, such as blogs, wikis, social networking, BI search, and mashups.1

Companies such as Siemens USA, Best Buy, and Sun Microsystems use social media to form powerful online communities. Those communities — through an "amplification effect" — foster innovation and process improvements far more quickly than companies can achieve with traditional improvement mechanisms.

Sun cofounder Bill Joy famously observed that "innovation happens elsewhere" [1]. He went on to observe that no matter how intelligent the innovators in a company, there are far more smart people outside that company.

In my work as an agile coach, I find many teams applying agile techniques are puzzled about how to slice epic requirements into user stories. In Planning Extreme Programming, Kent Beck and Martin Fowler define stories simply:

I’ve always liked to think of myself as somewhat of a techie. I have always had the latest computers, I had e-mail fairly early on, and I was an early adopter of Skype.

At least, we certainly hope this statement is so. There's no question that organizations -- both government and business -- are paying more attention. Compared to a couple of years ago, when "IT governance" didn't appear on most radar screens, this year has seen many clients coming out and looking for improvements.

One of the seemingly perpetual issues that we face is "business-IT alignment." First, we might ask what that really means. Then, we can look for ways to specify and achieve the alignment.

eBay is undoubtedly one of the biggest success stories to come out of the dot-com boom and continues to thrive. In terms of market capitalization over its 15-year life, eBay has consistently and significantly outperformed the market, including such big names as Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

I've been thinking a lot about the findings from a new study cowritten by Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Union College researchers, which was recently published in the journal Science [1].