Within the world of IT vendors, the gap between rhetoric and reality looms large.

Strategic leadership involves the way you interact with the other members of the executive team, but to be effective, it must also be instilled within the IT organization.

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. There are some in the agile community who think that feature-oriented teams are the only correct way, but the issue is more complicated than a simple solution can handle. For software systems that run into millions of lines of code and large legacy systems for which the architecture can't be easily changed, a combined team strategy is often warranted.

As I write this Advisor, my primary computer is at my computer support organization, where it is being analyzed and cleansed of malware and viruses it has accumulated over the last six months or so. As careful as I am, these "gotcha" moments seem to come more and more frequently.

The third role type for product management is one that focuses on achieving corporate profitability or business value metrics. It incorporates many of the attributes of the product management roles for marketing and technology, but in a way in which those functions must be integrated in order to maximize business value.

A few weeks ago, I had a little electrical incident at my house. After the fire department left and the mess was cleaned up, we took stock of the damage. Except for the offending surge "protector" that caught fire, our UPCs pretty much did their job.

I recommend beginning a project with a risk assessment to identify potential problems. But such assessments are plagued with potential problems themselves. One is that expertise can act as a lens to magnify only a small part of the project. Fortunately, there are ways to work around these lenses.

Before a project starts, we assess the risks. The essence of this exercise is answering one question: "What could possibly go wrong?"

Last week, it was Oracle Corporation buying real-time data integration vendor GoldenGate Software, Inc. (see "Oracle Buys GoldenGate: Adds Real-Time Data Integration and 'Zero-Downtime' Migration Tools," 28 July 2009). This week, it's IBM acquiring data mining and statistical analysis tools vendor SPSS, Inc. for US $1.2 billion.

"IT, when used judiciously, is an indispensable asset. At the same time, it can be a forge of distractions and a time sink undermining our productivity."

-- Gabriele Piccoli, Editor

A large international company's agile transition recently got me contemplating countries' cultural differences and their impact on such transitions. The same thing happens in company transitions, of course, but cultural differences among countries have most been on my mind.

"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history," or so wrote Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in The Revolutionist's Handbook

The swine flu pandemic gives us an opportunity in real time to see how accurate Shaw's observation is in practice, especially in regard to "near misses."

We read much these days about business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) converging. Is that just hype, or does it really make sense? And if it does make sense, just what might that mean for our organization -- not just in terms of technology, but also in terms of that subtler, softer kind of thing we call "culture" -- the unwritten rules of the game?

We've been involved recently in a number of client initiatives to improve their IT governance. But what exactly does that mean?

I was startled a few weeks ago while talking to someone about enterprise architecture, when a question about data architecture came up. One of the EA folks in the group said, "3,3" -- as if that was the conclusive answer to a question, and a number of people nodded knowingly.

"Huh?" I said.

"Column 3, Row 3," he responded.

Strategic risk should be measured differently from tactical risk. Strategic risk should be forward-thinking, active, and opportunity-driven. In fact, the cost of not doing something should be measured creatively and -- as counterintuitive as it may seem -- quantitatively.

Many reviews over outsourcing agreements are conducted in a similar fashion as employee performance reviews. There are a few categories, and the current contract manager gives his or her personal opinion about performance on an annual basis.

Oracle Corporation is buying real-time data integration vendor GoldenGate Software, Inc. Although this deal can hardly be considered a strategic acquisition (financial terms were not disclosed), it is important, nevertheless, because it gives Oracle several real-time data integration technologies.

Much of the agile literature deals with applying agile principles to software development, project management, program management, and (possibly) portfolio management. To succeed with applications in these disciplines, employees must first be won over to wholeheartedly adopt agile.

Open innovation does not have the solid brand recognition that Joe Feller and I were expecting to see from the vast majority of the respondents to a recent Cutter Benchmark Review survey (see "Open Innovation: The

Not all SOA projects are created equal. Indeed, we might question the very notion of an "SOA project." At one end of the spectrum is the "services in advance" (SIA) approach. At the other end of the spectrum are more tactical, bottom-up approaches.

"Hey, Honey, what happened to my 1984?"

Portfolios are widely accepted and used by IT organizations to help manage sets of related IT assets, activities, and resources. These include projects, applications, infrastructure components, and IT services. The goals and intentions of using portfolios as management tools are all related to improving the business value delivered or derived from IT assets and capabilities by:

What do we mean by green computing or sustainability? Does it mean a focus on energy efficiency in the data center through less heat-producing and lower power-consumption server blades? Is it virtualization and shifting computing into the cloud to reduce carbon footprint or reducing paper consumption through new paperless processes?

There are so many different frameworks with which architects work -- TOGAF, Zachmann, FEAF, ITIL -- to name just a few. All have different goals, strengths, weaknesses, audiences, and so on. The one that I find to be the least well known among architects is COBIT.

Security and privacy concerns remain the leading issues preventing more organizations from using on-demand/cloud-based BI and data warehousing solutions. Infrastructure control issues and strategic considerations pertaining to the perceived value of in-house BI operations follow this.