One of the most difficult parts of project portfolio management is deciding how to rank the projects -- that is, determining which should be done now, later, and, most important, never. There are several ways to rank a project portfolio. Each is useful in specific situations and not so useful in others.

They say "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," and perhaps this is true for architects as well. I recently went through an experience that all architects and IT professionals should go through occasionally, but not too often. An insipid virus infected my computer, having evaded the defenses of my firewall/security product and, slowly but surely, rendered my laptop useless.

The March 2009 edition of Harvard Business Review has an excellent article titled "When Should a Process be Art, Not Science?" by Joseph M. Hall and M. Eric Johnson. The article contains many great insights, but there is a sense in the article that we need to choose; that the answer be one or the other: art or science. This appears to be true with most things that we try to categorize.

At the beginning of the year, I said that the most important BI-related initiative for organizations in 2009 would remain business performance management (see "Business Performance Management Tops '09 Strategy List," 6 January 2009).

While manufacturers are not there yet, the shift to global enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is happening. More than one-third of respondents to a recent Cutter Benchmark Review survey have a global ERP system in place. According to AMR Research, this number was much closer to 20% just a few years ago [1].

Organizations committed to the development of a measurement program to track and improve innovation efforts have at their disposal several off-the-shelf metrics commonly adopted by companies whose measurement programs are more mature. Where do managers turn, however, when they need to complete an innovation management program with internally developed measures unavailable on a store shelf?

How do agile organizations plan in today's world in which the future looks murky? I would recommend a two-pronged approach: set a strategic direction and be prepared to adapt. In thinking about strategy, I'm drawn to Virginia Postrel's words:

In the last Trends Advisor, I wrote about the increasing interest in "semantics" among the leading-edge software folks (see "Semantics Is Hot; Data and Objects Are Not, Part I: The Emergence of the Semantic Web," 19 March 2009).

Now that I am in Lexington, Kentucky, USA, the horse capital of the world, my thoughts have predictably wandered over to horses. I thought I might want to own a horse. So I called the family horse expert, my sister. She rode competitively in college and has owned and trained many horses. Currently, her daughters are riding competitively, and she is helping to teach them all about horses.

It's been five years in the making, and perhaps a few years later than promised, but TOGAF 9 was finally released to the public in mid-February 2009.

COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) products are great. Someone else does all the research, development, design, and manufacturing; we just read the spec sheet and buy the products. What could be better? Beware, however, the curse of COTS.

Several years ago I was working on a project to build a small device that used several COTS components. The device was a basic audio recorder. Some of the COTS in use included AAA batteries and SD memory cards. Both of these parts are available at any big-box retailer and both are inexpensive.

In a recent BI Executive Update (see "Open Source BI and Data Warehousing: New Directions," Vol. 9, No. 2), I discussed the possible impact on the BI market caused by end-user organizations adopting open source BI tools.

Like the stock market, IT projects can be volatile: requirements can change, scope can creep, unknown dependencies can appear, teams can get mired down in myriad ways, technology can fail, executive sponsorship can evaporate, schedules can jitter, and dates can slip.

It is sad but true that the economic crisis has now also appeared in Poland. Somehow, many of us here in Poland have been under the mistaken assumption that we would be undisturbed by the current economic crisis; that this was only an American and Western European problem. Of course, it couldn't remain that way.

What do you do when a team member is actually creating higher risk for the team, and yet you need that person and/or the organization insists you keep him or her? This is actually a far more common quandary than we care to believe.

The biggest trend to hit business intelligence (BI) since the days of executive information systems may not be an innovation in the technology itself but in the kinds of data the technology analyzes. The new BI foreshadows a time when, for example, a disease epidemic will be stopped because data can reveal to health officials the movements of infected people. Welcome to the world of "reality mining."

You can measure the effectiveness of your IT sourcing professionals by the prices and terms they get from their vendors, by the quality of the products and services they obtain, by their ability to develop relationships and integrate your company's objectives into their vendors' actions, by the time it takes them to close deals, by the wisdom of their choices as to what vendors to consider, and more.

I recently conducted a workshop on IT cost containment at a national conference (note that I will give an overview and discussion at this year's Cutter Consortium Summit 2009, 4-6 May, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA). In the workshop, I present several critical principles. I separate them into the "supply" and "demand" principles.

Organizations continue to recalibrate their business models in order to cut costs in challenging economic circumstances. At the same time, cuts that are spread evenly across business units and departments may seem democratic but can be a very shortsighted strategy.

A lot has been said lately about service-oriented architecture (SOA). Still, I would like to take a look at another angle of SOA adoption in the light of the current economic turmoil.

SOA adoption has many layers: the basic enterprise service bus (ESB) infrastructure, business process management (BPM) workflow tools, other SOA-related tools, such as BAM (business activity monitoring) or business rules engine (BRE), and SOA governance -- both runtime and design time.

In last week's Advisor, I discussed findings showing that the adoption of BI search (i.e., tools and applications combining BI reporting and analysis with Internet search enginelike functionality) remains limited (see "Adoption of BI Search Remains Limited," 17 March 2009).

IT management literature provides various, more-or-less theoretical recipes for release management implementation in the scope of technology management processes in the company. Those frameworks usually focus on strict definitions of processes and hardly ever extend their scope to cover business issues related to release implementation or its practical aspects.

The IT organization must simply align itself with the strategic orientation of the business. It is inappropriate for IT to define a strategic orientation in an independent manner. IT should not simply react to the business strategy with the given strategic orientation. IT needs to actively participate in the organization's strategic planning process.

Craig Barrett, retiring chairman of Intel, opened the CeBIT trade fair show in Hannover, Germany, on 3 March, by stressing that "it is important for companies to continue to spend on R&D and upgrade plants so that they are positioned to take advantage of the upturn when it does come." Although Barrett was talking about Intel's core business -- chip development -- his comment

(This is the first in a series of Trends Advisors that will deal with the complex landscape of content, unstructured and structured, that confront organizations and individuals as we move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and beyond. Future Advisors will deal with the growing schism between developers and database experts.)