All businesses go through phases -- from birth through growth and maturity to decline. However, businesses rarely die; instead, they evolve into something new and different through mergers, acquisitions, strategic regeneration, or other phenomena. That desire for business continuity is a major difference between business and project plans.

Enterprise architects often ask me why the Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM) EA approach is based on an "urban/transportation model" rather than the "building architecture model" favored by many organizations and groups. The short answer has to do with the similarity of the model to actual enterprise architecture in both change and complexity.

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.

Cloud computing provides a great number of advantages, but the new risks that it entails can't be ignored. Every company that takes advantage of these services will need to perform an analysis that looks at the specific risks posed by the service provided, service conditions, and the risk profile of the firm.

The use of open source BI and data warehousing tools continues to gain increasing acceptance by end-user organizations. But one of the big questions on a lot of people's minds is: what effect is open source BI adoption having on traditional BI software licensing?

Search is having a major influence on BI and data retrieval and analysis in general. Although the technology is still developing, the combination of BI and search is important because it can provide nontechnical business users and BI consumers with easier access to -- and the ability to analyze -- both structured and unstructured information.

A business can gain significant value from the Semantic Web by drawing on its capability to combine and interoperate with several technologies and services, encompassing data warehouses, disparate operating systems, and myriad types of messaging. The resulting "cohesive" technological platform allows in-depth user participation and collaboration that also reveals new and meaningful relationships among information silos and applications that may not be obvious to the business.

With significant input from fellow Cutter Consultant Ken Collier, I recently wrote an article called "The Agile Triathlete" that discussed how becoming skilled at test-driven development (TDD) was analogous to becoming a skilled triathlete.

In my last Trends Advisor ("Netbooks, 4G Networks to Spark IT's New Generation," 3 September), I suggested that the netbook, as opposed to what folks like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have been suggesting, is one of the major "disruptive technologies" of the decade.

The September issue of the Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) focuses on IT governance. In this Business-IT Strategies E-Mail Advisor, we examine current practices and the relationship of governance to IT's value. For example, we examine whether IT governance contributes to the value IT delivers.

In my previous Advisor ("Defining Architectures for the Cloud, Part I," 23 September 2009), I looked at the enterprise architecture domains of business, information, and application and how cloud computing would affect those areas.

While walking, a young man reached a crossroad. Unsure of which road to take, he looked around and saw an elderly gentleman passing by. He approached him and asked, "Sir, where does this road lead to?"

"Son, where do you want to go?"

The young man replied, "I don't know."

"Then it doesn't matter which road you're on."

This week saw an interesting development in which Actuate and Infobright teamed up to offer an open source BI solution that combines the former's open source reporting tools with the latter's open source data warehousing database. This effort is interesting for several reasons.

There was a time in the early 1990s when a good laptop computer cost upwards of US $4,000. This was for a computer with a 10-inch screen, four or eight MB of memory, and a 100-MB disk. Communications for this computer were limited to a slow-speed, dial-up line.

In a recent discussion, a manager kept asking me about requirements management in agile development, and it dawned on me that many traditionalist continue to focus on requirements, whereas agilists focus on features, capabilities, and stories.

Recently, a well-known IT advisory group brashly announced a "new" approach to enterprise architecture that it described as "emergent" and "nondeterministic," with central IT and its architects ceding some control and choice to constituents rather than trying to design and control everything.

"Be afraid ... be very afraid."

Many of our business processes -- operating over the Internet or otherwise -- remain wedded to a production-line mindset that is stuck in the world of the 1980s. A well-planned business process managemenht (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy needs to encourage the use of services as a tool to improve processes and solve specific business problems.

In my previous two Advisors ("Selected Innovations in Cloud Products," 9 September 2009, and "SOA and the Cloud: Getting Past the Hype," 19 August 2009), I talked about the different styles of the cloud (infrastructure as a service [IaaS], platform as a

Five to seven years ago, Java versus .Net was a hot topic. At that time, many organizations were at this important crossroad. Now, they have all made up their minds. But some are reconsidering their previous decision.

Putting it very briefly, .Net currently is more common in smaller, front-end projects, where integration with the desktop is essential, while Java is more common in larger, back-end projects, where legacy platforms run the core business applications and where integration with legacy systems is crucial.

Many organizations assume that if an obligation has been stated in a contract, the provider will comply with it and no further work needs to be done. However, astute organizations do not assume compliance; they ensure it. The time to discover the provider has not done so is not when your organization is seeking to invoke the clause, as the next case illustrates.

All the recent talk in the US surrounding proposed healthcare reform has inspired me to take a look at how BI and data warehousing are making an impact on healthcare and medicine. For our international readers who've not been following the healthcare debate in the US, the political discourse has reached a level of circuslike behavior.

There was an interesting and well-written column in the New York Times editorial section a few weeks ago called "Sleepwalking Through September," by Doug Glanville (20 August 2009).

We've never seen the effects of a recession during a time when so many customers and businesses depend on IT. Companies are responding very naturally by cutting projects and cutting investments in IT.

Agile testing is, among other things, about testing early, testing often, and testing smart. How do you achieve that? A combination of actions that can take place in parallel can help you get there. You can start by increasing your QA staff's skills through training (formal or peer-based) so that they are able to not only execute automated tests but also enhance the existing test-code base and create new ones.