While EA and service-oriented architecture (SOA) have their own advocates and camps of followers, recent developments have seen many of the EA approaches and frameworks looking to offer increasing support for SOA. The fact that business is increasingly conducted in a collaborative fashion, using distributed Internet technologies, makes this very welcome.

It's not the technology, stupid; it's the processes. Processes are good, bad, ugly, or indifferent depending on how well -- or poorly -- you provide incentives to promote their efficacy. Let me repeat: it's not the technology. In fact, among the triumvirate of people, process, and technology, technology is the least likely case of failure. Then comes people.

Last week, I discussed SAP AG's new Business Objects tool that combines BI reporting and analysis with functionality that is like an Internet search engine: SAP Business Objects Explorer (see "SAP Business Objects Explorer: BI Search Meets ERP, But Will It Accelerate Adoption of BI Search?," 19 May 2009).

As methods such as agile development, agile testing, and agile project management are increasingly deployed to enable organizations to respond faster to the increasing turbulence of the global business and government environment, the roles of sponsors and business experts in the project space must change.

Agile sponsorship is based on a few, very powerful concepts:

At the Cutter Summit 2009 conference in early May, I was talking with an executive from a company that contracts for large government projects.

With the ongoing proliferation of certifications available to business professionals of every type, it's no surprise that risk management has popped into the picture in the cost, IT development, and project management communities.

Regardless of a company's objectives, it must invest in operational and strategic technology. Operational technology has obviously become commoditized as prices have dropped and the industry has consolidated, but if acquisition, deployment, and support best practices are ignored, all of the advantages of commoditization disappear.

Many client organizations nearing the end of an outsourcing contract start to consider whether they should retender the deal.

Businesses depend heavily on use of the Internet to perform their activities. But have business personnel received enough training and ongoing awareness communications about how to use the Internet securely? Has your staff received any training or awareness communications at all?

For a long time, I have been advocating that the right analogy for enterprise architecture is urban/transportation planning versus building architecture.

IT managers need to have a split personality: they must be both conservative and innovative. On the one hand, they have to maintain older systems and keep current processes working smoothly. On the other hand, they have to continually examine new IT technologies that can alter the business. Around 1990, a "game-changing" technology, the Internet, emerged. New businesses that embraced the Internet in innovative ways -- such as eBay, Amazon, and Google -- thrived.

SAP AG just launched a new Business Objects BI product that combines BI reporting and analysis with functionality that is like an Internet search engine. SAP Business Objects Explorer combines the BI, search, and navigation capabilities of the Business Objects line with SAP's Business Warehouse and data warehousing accelerator appliance.

The term "service-oriented architecture" is relatively new, but the architecture is not. Even though architectures that used the CORBA or DCOM specifications in the 1990s were not called "service-oriented," they were essentially service-oriented architectures. Some other organizations preceded CORBA and DCOM with their own specifications and developed what we would today consider an SOA.

A business needs outstanding leadership to successfully navigate through today's complex, competitive world. Identifying and understanding the strategic orientation of your business toward customers and innovation is one thing; however, it is quite another to successfully reorient the organization in another direction.

I remember a time when I was deeply interested in maturity.

Throughout history, major shifts in communication technology have brought on major changes in politics and business, exploited by imaginative politicians and businesspeople. In the 1930s, for example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolph Hitler reached out via the radio to far more people than had ever heard directly from politicians. Businesses quickly began to use radio to advertise.

Vendors such as Lawson and SAP have recently announced increases in their annual support fees to many already struggling clients. In any economy, organizations would meet these increases with skepticism. This article details options for organizations in response to these potential increases.

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.

Despite the promises of service-oriented architecture (SOA), many organizations are increasingly encountering difficult governance issues as they start to ramp up their early SOA efforts. SOA governance tends to get approached in primarily two ways: as a technology or as a cultural phenomenon. The most fruitful approach lies somewhere in between.

Organizations today may choose from a broad range of on-demand and "cloud-based" BI and data warehousing options, ranging from reporting, dashboards, and focused analytic applications (offered as licensable services) to hosted data integration services and full-blown managed data warehouses.

Over the holidays I read a wonderful book by Atul Gawande called Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance.1 The book tells a variety of stories about improving all aspects of the medical profession. One thing that occurs in all the stories is the importance of metrics.

The goal of portfolio management within an IT environment is to help improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of IT efforts within an organization. You do this by ensuring that all projects and existing systems are visible, planned for, and aligned to the goals of your organization.

Recently, I was in Tampa and Chicago during the same week to speak at data management and business process conferences. It gave me a chance to find out what some of the best and brightest in the business were forecasting for the future of technology. I would imagine that all told there were more than 1,000 technology folks at these conferences.

It started innocently enough. A US educational institution (which we shall call WhoU) was looking to update and standardize the PII of current and former students in its electronic database and upgrade its software to automate much of this process on a going-forward basis.