In general, it is easier to obtain money, even in these hard times, than it is to "buy time." Many times every year, I find someone pressuring me or some hapless CIO or project manager into committing to some schedule that everyone knows is so nearly impossible that agreement is tantamount to eventual failure.

In general, it is easier to obtain money, even in these hard times, than it is to "buy time." Many times every year, I find someone pressuring me or some hapless CIO or project manager into committing to some schedule that everyone knows is so nearly impossible that agreement is tantamount to eventual failure. I often tell a story of a presentation that I made a few years ago to a financial organization that was on a long-term project to replace its 30-year-old core applications.

As organizations relentlessly seek cost-cutting opportunities in our darkening economic environment, energy consumption is likely a bright target. The IT organization should prepare for that day when an operations executive asks the CIO: how will your department contribute to the company's collective belt tightening with energy cost savings? Being prepared isn't just for Boy Scouts.

Pretend that you are either starting a new company or -- with the help of a magic wand -- completely reengineering the technology delivery model at your current company. What do you do? One of the steps that you should take involves enterprise architecture.

Like electrical service, computing has become a utility. You can draw on your required computing resources -- hardware, software, storage, applications, and infrastructure -- when and where you need them and in the amount you need.

Microsoft has stepped up its efforts to become a serious enterprise data warehouse player with the introduction of its SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse (SSFTDW) offerings -- a set of reference architectures for data warehousing available on pretested, preconfigured standard hardware from Bull, Dell, and HP.

Cloud computing is and will be a major trend. By this, I specifically mean that there is a trend toward the progressive replacement by your organization of its owned facilities, hardware, and operations by virtual facilities housed somewhere in the great Wherever and rented on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Every so often, I like to revisit some of the threads of thought that wove themselves into the agile movement. One of these is complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory, which could be considered a science of adaptation. CAS concepts, found in several agile methods, are an important backdrop to many agile principles and practices.

Anyone who has been in the work force more than a matter of weeks has had the experience. You think you know what management wants. You believe you're working in the organization's best interests. You want to show some measure of independence and personal vision. And you act. No sooner do you show just a modicum of initiative, you are crushed like a grape!

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.