In this Advisor, we'll consider some tactics for employing service-oriented architecture (SOA) techniques to improve your agile projects -- in other words, at service-orienting agile.

One of the major strengths of cloud computing is the freedom it gives companies to think strategically -- not tactically -- about how they want to leverage technology.

The intensely fractious healthcare debate should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone whose risks ultimately touch the personal lives of others. It has been a dramatic American experience as an entire nation has staked out positions either for or against the increased government role in individual healthcare and health insurance.

Service-oriented viewpoints are a way of gaining early measurable business value through reuse of existing services, including external cloud services as well as internal legacy services. Think of each viewpoint as a different pair of spectacles through which the analyst views the process.

Complex event processing (CEP) generated a lot of hype in 2007 and 2008. By 2009, however, the hype has died down. With the recent "Community Technology Preview" release of Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight, I expect the hype meter to begin revving up once again.

While post-recovery conditions are not likely to immediately return to pre-crash states, some cyclical trends will remain in place and help us forecast the medium term. Other forces outside IT may have the greatest impact on IT's future.

Businesses have been sourcing, and will continue to source, services from third parties located in distant countries to meet their organizational objectives of reduced cost, improved efficiencies, and higher quality of services. Yet the interconnectedness of enterprises increases operational complexity and adds to the burden on each entity to comply with strict privacy legislation and data-security requirements.

The recent announcement by BI vendor MicroStrategy, Inc., that its BI toolset (MicroStrategy 9) has been certified to run on the VMware virtualization platform has me thinking more about the possible benefits and issues of operating BI systems in virtualization environments.

Our industry benefited from a surge of IT capital spending in the years leading up to 2000 and has had little since then. That means the average company may now be running on an IT capital base that has been depreciated away to nothing or near nothing.

To make something new (a thing, a service, or an idea), you might adopt a goal: to make something new. We can call that an abstract goal: it’s perfectly particular, but allows for an infinite number of realizations. You can’t describe that goal in any detail, as you would an algorithm or a piece of music. The only way to describe it usefully is to repeat it.

Recently, looking at scaling issues for a couple of multinational organizations, the issue of feature teams (customer-oriented) versus component teams (technically oriented) arose again. In an earlier Advisor (see "Feature vs.

"Information wants to be free, but organizations want to charge for it."

-- Cutter Fellow Tom DeMarco

Even today, capacity planning in IT proves difficult. Data storage requirements continue to grow dramatically. CPU demand keeps moving along briskly. Network consumption grows, too.

I suppose I ought to know better, and I do, but the marketing hype still never ceases to impress me. The latest victim: "the cloud." It is reported by our friends in the hype-cycle department that cloud computing is at the pinnacle of being overblown.

Unless you have been buried under a rock for the past eight years, you have probably noticed that practically all of the revolutionary IT products and hot services that get the big buzz are being developed directly for the consumer sector. Think about all of the great new products -- wireless LAN, instant messaging, Web 2.0, social networking, MP3 players, PDA technology, flash drives, and cloud computing (yes even cloud computing, which is mostly a means for Google and Amazon to recoup some of their excess capacity investments).

The majority of organizations using on-demand or cloud-based BI and data warehousing are basically satisfied with their solutions.

Companies forgo any number of initiatives for a variety of reasons. Most companies are risk-averse. But what about the initiatives that fall through the cracks of the vetting and due diligence processes, the initiatives that never even result in a business case?

In my last Advisor, we examined some opportunities for applying agile principles to a "services in advance" (SIA) approach to SOA (see "How to Help Agile Get a Head Start," 23 July 2009).

Is your perimeter secure? The answer to that is simple: NO. As business has become more distributed, outsourcing has gone global, supply chains are more connected, employees have become teleworkers, customers demand better information, and so on, we have systematically punched holes into perimeter security until it now resembles Swiss cheese.

Shareholders are demanding. They want higher share prices. They ride a winner, and then when their horse fades, they switch to another horse. In this regard, public companies answer to just one master.

Service-oriented viewpoints, which I outlined in an earlier Update (see "Service-Oriented Viewpoints," Vol. 12, No. 1.), provide a useful, low-risk approach that can help leverage your investment in existing process models and services as part of a well-planned business-IT alignment strategy.

Utility IT support and systems development for small, medium-sized, and large companies have been and will continue to be transitioned to a service that is supported and managed by external IT service providers.

Culture is a feeling in your organization that is hard to categorize but easy to see. Culture is what your employees say about service and the customer when no one else is around -- around the lunch table or over drinks. Culture is an attitude toward quality.

This Advisor continues our discussion of performance reviews for outsourcing contracts. There are three aspects of performance reviews. The first is the successful performance of the scope, which is made up of input performance, process performance, and output performance.

About one-fifth of end-user organizations surveyed have conducted studies in order to estimate cost savings and possible benefits from using on-demand/cloud-based BI and data warehousing solutions, and a clear majority of the results from these studies were found to be favorable.