The 3.8% contraction in gross domestic product (GDP) for the fourth quarter of last year, while better than the 5.5% contraction that economists had been predicting, was still not good news. Why? Inventories increased. If you account for those increased inventories, GDP shrank 5.1%.

The first part of my analysis of this year's IT trends data from a recent Cutter survey1 focuses on the labor within the IT organization, specifically issues associated with outsourcing and with staffing levels. We posed a general question to our respondents asking them to describe their current IT staffing situation.

I recently received a large architecture document to review. After poring through a few hundred pages of text and drawings, I was impressed by how much work and thought had gone into it yet how utterly useless it was. Now, don't get me wrong: it's not that architecture is unimportant; quite the opposite. The classic, big architecture document is just the wrong way to deliver it. I had hoped that the industry had gotten past these kinds of deliverables; apparently I was wrong.

Like me, you may already be all too well aware of the Trojan horse as a security threat and use regular virus checks to avoid the problem. Yet, the same idea -- smuggling through content under a label that refers to something else -- can be used with a much more positive effect.

I recently received a large architecture document to review. After poring through a few hundred pages of text and drawings, I was impressed by how much work and thought had gone into it yet how utterly useless it was. Now, don't get me wrong: it's not that architecture is unimportant; quite the opposite. The classic, big architecture document is just the wrong way to deliver it.

Lessons learned are often the most overlooked aspect of risk management. They are seen somehow as a secondary follow-on to the risk management effort rather than as the cornerstone on which we build. The inverse should clearly be true.

In last week's Advisor, I wrote that the most demanding task confronting organizations in their business performance management initiatives is identifying and implementing the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics needed to measure and manage operational performance in relation to strategies and goals (see, "Six Key Roadblocks En Ro

I am sitting here, sipping my free cup of coffee at McDonald's, looking across the parking lot at the huge going-out-of-business banners strung across the entrance to my local Circuit City store.

"I wonder," I said, joking with the McDonald's manager, who I know pretty well, "if they had to pay for those banners up front and in cash?"

No other target of investment is likely to generate higher returns than innovation.1 While this isn't news for many companies, the fact that a growing number use performance measures to manage innovation should be of interest to those who don't.

My last Advisor, "The 31-Square-Foot Architecture" (15 January 2009), raised some strong reactions, ranging from "Wonderful" to "Dogmatic Nonsense." Therefore, I'd like to keep to this subject and elaborate a little bit more on architectural decisions in agile teams.

Many years ago, I was working for a subsidiary of General Electric (GE) and I found myself making a presentation to a gathering of executives from one of GE's financial divisions. Before I made my pitch, there was a video address from Jack Welch, GE's famous CEO of the time.

No other target of investment is likely to generate higher returns than innovation.1 While this isn't news for many companies, the fact that a growing number use performance measures to manage innovation should be of interest to those who don't.

Concerns over a recession are affecting business and IT organizations globally -- private and public sectors alike. A number of economists and industry analysts submit that most companies need to realign their business and IT strategies to maintain a balanced state of operations for the next couple of years.

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.

You might have seen the recent news reports about the collision between US and Russian communication satellites (see "Debris Spews Into Space After Satellites Collide," New York Times, 11 February 2009). The US satellite was one of the Iridium satellites.

Back in early January, I said that the most important BI-related initiative for organizations in 2009 would be business performance management (see "Business Performance Management Tops '09 Strategy List," 6 January 2009). In fact, I recommended that you consider business performance management a strategic application.

As it was two millennia ago, today a decimation of sorts remains a distressing part of our cultural experience.

I recently had an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) procedure performed on my knee. The report was full of such words as joint effusion, medial patellar plica, acute medullary bone contusions, and medial femoral condyle. While my doctor could easily read and interpret the report for me, my attempts to understand the report were doomed.

I am sitting here, sipping my free cup of coffee at McDonald's, looking across the parking lot at the huge going-out-of-business banners strung across the entrance to my local Circuit City store.

"I wonder," I joked with the McDonald's manager, who I know pretty well, "if they had to pay for those banners up front and in cash?"

There's an embedded hierarchy in the deployment of Web 2.0 technology. Our interview, observation, and survey data all suggest that the lowest-hanging fruit -- surprise -- gets picked first.1 Wikis, blogs, and social networks -- perhaps because of their C2C origins -- have been deployed more than the other technologies.

I am sitting here, sipping my free cup of coffee at McDonald's, looking across the parking lot at the huge going-out-of-business banners strung across the entrance to my local Circuit City store.

"I wonder," I joked with the McDonald's manager, who I know pretty well, "if they had to pay for those banners up front and in cash?"

Before I start to lay out an appropriate outsourcing strategy for agile projects, here is one major piece of advice: If you have the choice, don't do it!

Here is a question: "What will the computing environment of a midsize enterprise be in 2020?" That is, it seems to me, a fair question. The year 2020 is just about 11 years away (10 years if you're in government), and a decade is just a blink of the eye. What programming language will you be developing systems in: Java, .NET, Python, Ruby -- something else? What database management system will you be using? What computing platform will your organization be using: centralized, decentralized, on the cloud?

Gaining momentum for any type of IT architectural effort partly depends on the organization's level of architecture adoption maturity. Push too soon, and the necessary infrastructure won't have had time to mature, and your solutions won't scale.

Here is a question: "What will the computing environment of a midsize enterprise be in 2020?" That is, it seems to me, a fair question. The year 2020 is just about 11 years away (10 years if you're in government), and a decade is just a blink of the eye. What programming language will you be developing systems in: Java, .NET, Python, Ruby -- something else?