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.

Capital assets are long-term investments whose ROIs are expected to more than repay their capital. Conventional software components rarely satisfy this definition. A prominent reason is that our industry demands components be used as is, much like physical parts. Yet unlimited malleability is software's greatest asset (and its greatest liability).

In his recent Advisor "Achieving Agile Software: Fail to Scale -- Prepare to Fail" (25 June 2009), Cutter Senior Consultant Paul Allen had raised the issue of the connection between agile and SOA.

The first week of July was a momentous occasion in the annals of cybercrime. Coordinated attacks on US and South Korean government systems created charges and countercharges in an international, Internet-based whodunit.

Cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) have captured plenty of industry and press attention, but they have also created an equal share of confusion and even controversy. While there are solid reasons to be cautious about how to approach these rapidly evolving Web-based alternatives, there is also growing evidence that they are no passing fad.

It's no secret that these are tough times. Technology budgets are being slashed over and over again. But the need to develop new products, solve tough R&D problems, creatively improve customer service, and reengineer business processes has never been greater.

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

Like you, I try to keep up with what's going on in the industry by reading magazines, articles, and so on. Perhaps it's the economy, or just coincidence, but in the past few months, there seem to have been more than enough articles about the impotence of IT.

The Internet is undergoing a rapid transformation from a web of hyperlinked documents to a web of semantically linked data. Recent observations lead me to believe we're seeing the emergence of what may qualify as Web 3.0 (or Semantic Web) applications [1]. These applications are consumers and providers of semantically linked data.

The option of using on-demand and cloud-based BI and data warehousing (DW) solutions is causing some end-user organizations to forego or reconsider renewing some of their existing BI/DW software licenses. At this time, however, this trend is limited.

We all know by now that the relationship between the parties of an outsourcing contract is paramount to the success of the deal. While there is a fair bit of advice out there, it is mainly process-oriented (e.g., communicate frequently, plan together, have improvement workshops). But what if you genuinely do not like your counterpart on the other side?

I disagree with the premise that prosperity breeds innovation and scarcity kills it. People innovate when there is a need to find a new or better way to do something. The decline in our economy has created a tremendous need for everyone to find innovative ways to prosper with less.

While organizations seem intent on adopting methodologies, the diversity in the tools they choose to apply to support them is virtually limitless.

Remember ^KB, ^KK, ^KC, ^KV, and ^KY? These are the WordStar commands for marking, copying, moving, and deleting blocks of text. For those old enough to remember, WordStar was the dominant word-processing software in the early 1980s that was dead by the early 1990s.

In Part II of this series (see "Managing the Complete Product Lifecycle, Part II: The Technical Product Manager," 3 June 2009), we talked about the product manager role that is primarily focused on the technical integrity of the product.

Recently, we've written about some core strategies that help ensure the success of enterprise architecture, such as developing key EA capabilities (see "Six Key Capabilities on Road to EA Success," 18 March 2009) and employing an iterative and incremental approach to EA programs (see "Take Iterative Steps: Start Small, Empower Team Via Vision, Value," 29 April 2009).