The iterative and incremental approach to software development has become a well-established best practice, as evidenced by its centrality to any number of software development methodologies, including agile and variations on the Unified Process.

On a broader scale, this approach provides a valuable strategy for developing an effective enterprise architecture program. We won't bother to argue that a "big bang" approach to EA doesn't work: many able experts have overwhelmingly made that case.

Mobile technology, its applications, and the services that are delivered over the wireless channel continue to evolve. A recent survey by Cutter Consortium spans from consolidated hardware form factors, such as the laptop, to evolving applications, such as Twitter and location-based contextualized messaging services exploiting the capabilities of such devices as the smartphone (for more on this survey, see Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 9, No. 3).

In a strange twist of fate, the annual MySQL Conference was just getting underway in Santa Clara, California, USA, when news hit that Oracle Corporation was acquiring Sun and, along with it, MySQL. That the most aggressive enterprise software company was buying the world's leading open source database struck like lightning.

It's déjà vu all over again. The cycle has repeated. The economy is and will continue to shed jobs. Businesses are trying to get leaner. Again, IT is expected to not only shrink itself, but help other units in the firm shrink themselves. A key approach for doing so involves reengineering the business process (BPR).

My last Advisor (see "In Time of Testing, Remember Values, Communication, Slack, Part I," 26 March 2009)1 raised this question: how do you perform in such difficult times while maintaining the company's values? Is it possible at all? The answer is "yes," and the evidence can be found in history.

With the current state of the economy, there has been a seemingly endless stream of articles about scarcity and the natural human reactions to it. Almost to a one, the articles examine the propensity of individuals to focus on what they might not have if the situation doesn't improve, prompting the reaction of thrift. People save. People hoard.

Before you do anything else, please go and read the Boston Globe article headlined "Electronic Health Records Raise Doubt" (13 April 2009).

People have diverse beliefs as to what a successful contract is. Some would consider a contract successful if it did not end up in court. Others believe it to be successful if they did not need to manage the contractor too much. In a recession, it will be about getting it cheaper than before.

I met with several CIOs recently and discussed their approaches to cost containment. In the discussion, one made the interesting point that cost containment is merely the current crisis. CIOs have regularly faced others: innovation (last year), alignment (the year before), demonstrated value of IT (the year before that), and so forth.

As an architect, I'm constantly challenged to help organizations come up with better ways to do things. Unfortunately, in IT, we don't usually bring in architecture before there is some kind of mess to clean up.

Every time I am asked to look at a suffering project, I see the same very basic failing: all the project objectives are vague.

This applies to projects costing more than US $100 million and ongoing for eight years, as well as smaller projects. In fact, I have concluded that management everywhere has not got a clue as to how to set clear objectives for projects. The problem is management's vague, nice-sounding phrases: though not in deadlines, sales targets, and budgets.

Silicon Valley startup Kickfire, Inc. has developed a new data-warehousing appliance based on the open source MySQL database. Kickfire is a "true" appliance. By which I mean it packages both software and hardware designed specifically to support data warehousing and BI applications (as opposed to just providing specifications or reference architectures for various hardware/software bundles).

Many economists believe that the risks present in the current global economic downturn have the potential to repeat the Depression years of the 1930s.

In a recent discussion among international members of the Centre for Art and Leadership at the Copenhagen Business School, we considered the broad question: "What can art do for business in the current financial crisis?"

When the times get rough, competition gets tougher; that's a general law. Software companies have dozens if not hundreds of employees on their "underutilized" lists. The companies that view their employees as assets and not as cost fight to keep their jobs.

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."

-- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The argument was getting heated. At one end of the table stood the Linux bigots, banded together and angry. At the other end were the Microsoft bigots, standing stalwart and snooty. At stake was the future of operating systems for a new business intelligence platform. Neither side would retreat from its position that its product was superior.

As discussed in the first Advisor in this series (see "A Capability Trilogy, Part I: The Politics of Capability," 25 March 2009), capability-oriented thinking is becoming increasingly influential in methodologies, enterprise architecture frameworks, and business strategy.

Make no small plans for they have no power to stir the soul.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

Recent developments have brought together parallel processing and cloud computing technologies in such a way that they are set to change the way organizations look at analyzing massive amounts of data. In fact, I believe that these developments hold the promise of ushering in a new era in high-end, affordable data analysis.

The world of business technology is dramatically changing. Everything about it is changing, including what we acquire, deploy, support, the way we support it, and -- perhaps most important -- the way we manage it all.

Preparing for a couple of conference presentations recently, I started thinking about a graphic to illustrate the key components of scaling agile projects, many of which have been discussed in prior Advisors. Visualize a house structure with a roof, a foundation, and three pillars (see Figure 1).

Recently, I had a conversation with Julie Zawisza, director of communications for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

It's déjà vu all over again. The cycle has repeated. The economy is and will continue to shed jobs. Businesses are trying to get leaner. Again, IT is expected to not only shrink itself, but help other units in the firm shrink themselves. A key approach for doing so involves reengineering the business process (BPR).

Companies today are trying to lower costs and increase staffing flexibility by taking some, or even all, of their development activities overseas. Many of these same organizations have teams that are using agile development practices to increase quality and improve project performance. What happens when these two trends in our industry intersect?