Counting by numbers, Scrum is currently the leading agile methodology.

Like many people, I grow increasingly unhappy with the level of public discourse. In an age of "in-your-face politics" and "hardball" discussions in which two extreme positions are posed as the way to present public policy, it is difficult to imagine what the future of the world may be like. Then, the other day, I had a discussion that made me think that all was not lost.

Increasingly, we find business processes that are offered in alternative ways using different channels. For example, purchasing vehicle highway tax in the UK over the counter or online over the Internet. At the same time, as well as offering a process in its entirety over one channel, the same process can be supported by different channels at different points in the process.

In a recent interview, Mike Culver, the cloud computing evangelist for Amazon.com, clearly stated the cloud computing value statement for his company: "Amazon's goal is to take the fixed cost out of computing!" That's pretty simple. There has been a great deal of discussion of the TCO of one thing or another over the years, but rarely is the entirety of the operational overhead really factored in. We can learn what the TCO is for a desktop or a server or an Oracle product, for instance, but nobody goes to the trouble to include all of the factors involved.

A couple of recent client engagements with very large companies reminded me about the fixation on process in many companies. Having used agile, iterative methods for so many years, I lost track of how pervasive process orientation can be in some organizations.

Enterprise mashups increasingly are becoming part of companies' toolkits when it comes to integrating data for BI and other decision-support applications.

Today's business-IT divide reminds me forcibly of an anecdote about the automobile market at the end of the 19th century. At that time, it was widely held that the total market for automobiles in Europe could only be around 50,000 because that was the probable number of chauffeurs that were going to be available at any one time.

Like most agile-lean enthusiasts, I regularly attend interest group meetings in my area. When discussing test-driven development (TDD) at some recent gatherings, some folks commented that they have very senior developers within their teams who claim to have become so proficient with TDD that they can actually skip the test-coding step. These developers go straight to implementing the feature because the discipline is so well imprinted in their heads that they can do it all mentally.

Como muchos entusiastas en agile-lean con frecuencia atiendo juntas de grupos de interés no lejos de casa. En algunas de las juntas recientes hubo discusiones sobre TDD (del Inglés test-driven development: desarrollo basado en pruebas), donde algunas personas comentaron que sus equipos cuentan con desarrolladores tan expertos en TDD que hasta pueden saltarse el paso de escribir pruebas primero y en su lugar programar la característica directamente porque tienen la disciplina bien metida en su cabeza y pueden hacerlo mentalmente.

As a friend of mind was fond of pointing out, jobs are self-selecting. Accountants go into accounting because they like numbers, surgeons go into surgery because they like to cut, and psychiatrists go into psychiatry because they ... have issues.

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.