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.)

A company is a collection of distinct units that are supposed to collaborate well with each other in order to deliver a superior product or service. But do all the parts work together well? In times of transition and significant change, how firms do things can also change significantly, requiring the units within the firm to learn how to realign and collaborate in new ways.

A key objective of enterprise architecture (EA) is to deliver to business strategies and imperatives. This is also the basis for measuring the success of EA investment. While architectural models, specifications, standards, and so on are, of course, important; they will not, in and of themselves, enable this on their own. A foundational set of organizational capabilities must be in place that enables businesses to realize architecture-based solutions on a sustained basis.

The term "agile" has been used extensively over the years. "Agile leaders," "agile teams," "agile projects": these are some of the common phrases we get to hear often in the context of agile project management (APM). When a new concept takes birth, the core understanding behind it also evolves over a period of time. With time, however, it also presents a danger of getting camouflaged and of being taken for granted. Hence, revisiting the same from time to time can bring a deeper level of understanding and clarity to the existing concept and keep its essence intact.

BI search (i.e., tools and applications combining BI reporting and analysis with functionality like Internet search engines) has received a fair amount of attention over the past few years.

Much of the perceived successes of outsourcing are merely the initial honeymoon reports (i.e., the initial announcement of a deal). These are focused on celebrating a deal that has been signed and its anticipated benefits. Rarely do we get the followup report regarding whether any of the expected outcomes were actually achieved.

There are two broad categories of topics related to scaling agile projects: organization and product. Several previous Advisors have focused on organizational scaling; this one will begin to focus on the product side, including such topics as architecture, roadmaps, backlogs, and multilevel release planning.

The past week saw several news stories that remind us how fragile IT security has become and how the opportunities created by the tremendous power of the Internet to share information can also create major risks.

I have been using two devices since they launched: the BlackBerry (since 1999) and the iPhone (since July 2007), and neither has left my side since its launch, except for a five-month trial separation from my BlackBerry. As I write this, two devices -- the BlackBerry 9000 and the iPhone 3G -- are charging.

Staffing has taken an expected hit, according to our recent research on IT trends for 2009.1 While still about half of companies thankfully remain in a stable IT hiring situation, only a quarter of companies are currently hiring, and the remaining 25% are downsizing.

This month I gave a cost-containment workshop at a national conference on IT financial management. While there, I spent three good days listening to a variety of speakers who mostly focused on how better to manage IT investment. I've written about some of the high points and my impressions here.

We are beginning to hear more serious thought given to the concept of third-party providers managing desktop environments via the cloud.

Enterprises need to be competent to perform well and succeed. However, it is often less clear what enterprise competence means. In our context of knowledge management (KM), we focus on ways in which knowledge contributes to competence and how KM-related initiatives must be considered to maintain and build it.

Virtualization is one of the hottest IT trends today. But when it comes to data warehousing, you'd hardly know it, because virtualization has made little impact in the data warehousing space. There's a good reason for this, which I'll get to in a minute.

Initiating the "right" projects is just one aspect of portfolio management; you must also appropriately monitor and guide ongoing development projects as well as systems that are in production or being retired. During development, it is critical to monitor your organization's standard metrics (more on this in a minute), as well as those issues that are specific to the individual project.

Conception --> Closure --> Delivery

Agile methods (Scrum, XP, Crystal, DSDM, Feature-Driven Development, etc.) have moved into the mainstream over the past few years. Earlier in their adoption cycle, industry leaders such as BMC Software, British Telecom, Capital One, DTE Energy, and Yahoo!