If you are considering outsourcing, then your evolving business case must address at least three go/no-go decisions:

Your initial business case is based on best estimates, so your first go/no-go decision determines whether a competitive process is a go.

A recent BI and data warehousing survey, conducted by data warehousing and analytics vendor Kognitio and solutions provider Baseline Consulting, has received a fair amount of attention in the IT press. The most controversial findings have to do with the value of analyzing data obtained from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.

Agility is not reaching far enough into organizations. Too many agile development initiatives fall far short of their potential. Too many organizations have a few successful agile projects, but fail to sustain agility. Success on a few, or even more than a few, projects doesn't translate to wider acceptance of agile principles and practices in the organization.

Pure agile methods in real organizations do not work in practice. This is not because agility is not valuable. Far from it: project sponsors and other business stakeholders are seeking out agility together with development professionals.

CIOs are warming up to the idea of semantic technologies -- IT artifacts capable of making explicit the meaning contained in the relations among information objects. When properly elicited and structured, relational and semantic technologies can help to expose and maximize a certain degree of "intelligence" that we seek from our systems.

In 1968, an ecologist named Garrett Hardin published an article in Science titled "The Tragedy of the Commons."1 This article described a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently and rationally, driven by their own self-interest, will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen.

There's no lower-hanging fruit than thin fruit. The adoption of Web-enabled smartphones is outpacing just about every technology in history.1 As form factors have improved, so has functionality. Lots of assumptions have been challenged along the way. For example, how many of us believed that no one would watch video on a one-inch-by-one-inch screen?

A "fuzzy" project is one where something feels out of sorts. Maybe the goal statement is a bit aggressive, and the project manager (PM) wonders whether or not it can be achieved. Maybe the proposed solution just doesn't seem to do the job. Or maybe the assumption of a cause-and-effect relationship between goal and solution is a bit of a stretch.

Back in October, I wrote that the question of whether the cloud model is reliable enough for corporate IT would not be answered soon, adding that no amount of reassurances from service providers or IT analysts would really settle the question (see "Viability of the Cloud Model Still Up in the Air," 20 October 2009).

In this series of Advisors, we are exploring some typical problems traditionally trained managers run into when their firm begins to use agile.

There are two major strategic bets that went bad in the news this week that are interesting from an enterprise risk management perspective.

The beginning of a new year is a good time to make resolutions, and the beginning of a new decade is an even better time. The resolutions that I'm going to concentrate on in this Advisor (I reserve the right to add to it later) include a number of words and phrases that I believe confuse those of us in enterprise architecture and/or systems development as well as our clients.

In many organizations, IT has become crucial in the support, sustainability, and growth of the business.

Welcome to the fifth-anniversary edition of my New Year's resolutions for enterprise architects. I hope the following five will provide food for thought and some inspiration:

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

-- George S. Patton Jr., Letter of Instruction Number 1, Third Army

You've got to be in top physical condition. Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

-- Vince Lombardi

Fatigue comes to each of us every day and affects us at work. There are things we can do to reduce or increase the fatigue and ways we can work through and around the fatigue.

The presumption behind sourcing is that the vendor will, and generally does, bring in technical depth and hands-on expertise for IT projects and programs where it is engaged. Traditionally, inhouse architects, designers, and other senior technologists would be involved in complex technology initiatives. As they helped to solve problems -- say, configuring networks, servers, and firewalls or defining key interfaces with external partners -- enterprise architects would add back to the organizational knowledge ecosystem.

Although it may not be as trendy or sound as cutting edge as some of the other analytic applications I've been covering (social network analysis, data mining, etc.), I can almost guarantee that more organizations will be examining workforce analytics as the new year progresses. Here's why.

Innovation is everyone's job. Regardless of where we sit in an organization, innovation is essential to survival and therefore a core competency of every competitive organization on the planet. But how will 21st-century companies innovate?

My last Advisor on leading agility focused on the fact that agility was not reaching far enough into organizations (see "Making Middle Managers Catalysts for Agility," 25 November 2009).

There are analogies that make it possible for a new field like software engineering to make progress, and there are analogies that confuse the basic issues. One of the latter is comparing software elements (objects, components, services, etc.) with Lego blocks. Now, my criticism is not against Lego blocks; I love Legos, my kids love Legos, and my grandkids love Legos....

Why is it that silos, like weeds in a garden, sprout perennially and require vigilance and hard work to remove? Those whose work spans silos see clearly the cost of silos in terms of cash and calories. Organizations with strong silos have a harder time coordinating processes and integrating data across those silos.

Occasionally, I will ask my students, "Why is the Roman Coliseum still standing?" The answer that I'm fishing for is, "Because the folks who tried to tear it down in the Middle Ages for building material were not as good engineers as the folks who put it up hundreds of years earlier." All this was recently brought to mind because I've been reading a series of historical novels set in 9th centu

Business intelligence (BI) solutions continue to rise in importance in the corporate decision-making processes at every level. At the same time, the size of the data sets that need to be analyzed and the complexity of integration processes have resulted in strains in traditional data warehousing infrastructure models and significant gaps in capability to provide a growing number of less sophisticated users with the insight that they require.

Several weeks ago when I issued my predictions for the coming year, I said that I expected that the use of software and services for analyzing social networking/media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Yelp, would begin to increase in 2010 (see "BI and Data Warehousing Predictions for 2010," 22 December 2009).

This week, we're taking a look back at the five most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Agile Product & Project Management practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles.