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.

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.