In 2002, the most common remedy for schedule problems was overtime. Now, six years later, a Cutter Consortium survey has revealed some interesting news: when projects run into scheduling problems, the two most common remedies are extending the schedule and reducing functionality, with overtime relegated to third place, followed by adding staff. This represents a distinct change from 2002, when Cutter conducted an identical survey. Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant E.M. Bennatan spearheaded both surveys.

Innovation can be orchestrated in many ways, such as by:

Using an internal process alone

Engaging customers and experts

Partnering with key suppliers

Creating a teaming arrangement with other companies including competitors

Using the new distributed cocreation approach1

I spent quite a bit of time studying martial arts in the past. While I wouldn't say that this made me more capable of coming out of a bar fight unscathed, the effort kept me (relatively) physically fit, introduced me to my future wife, and taught me some valuable lessons. Two lessons that translate quite nicely to the workplace are (1) the notion that you don't become agile overnight, and (2) true agility transcends such traits as flexibility.

IT is sort of caught in the middle of a debate. In one corner stands a group of researchers and enthusiasts who look at the marvels of how the human mind can make quick, accurate judgments and decisions. This group tends to look optimistically at the capabilities of the human mind to work effectively in the environment.

Although we in the IT professions don't eat our young, we certainly do take clear concepts and make them completely vague and less than understandable -- to the point of making the concept unusable. Asset management is one of these concepts. Through the normal IT developmental processes, asset management now means almost anything we want -- ranging from project portfolio management to help desk support tools to procurement.

This is the time of year when everyone makes resolutions and projects what they'd like to see in the new year. As I thought about what CIOs could wish for, it occurred to me that they might wish for inclusion of US President Elect Barack Obama's Infrastructure Investment Program for 2009.

Generally, in software development, process is described as the steps we take to get things done. It is often captured as a specified approach to building our products that involves some sort of lifecycle, a collection of roles and responsibilities, a series of artifacts we produce along the way, perhaps some milestones, and some checks and balances to help keep the whole system running smoothly. There is more than meets the eye, though, if we want our approach to be successful.

Happy New Year! I wish everyone a terrific 2009 and success in all projects you undertake.

We face a crisis that is affecting everyone, not just one business or one industry, or even one country. Many businesses will survive this recession, or as some assert, a depression, but a number of companies will either go bankrupt or be acquired. A few businesses will figure out how to thrive and take advantage of this situation.

When introducing an agile approach to IT development into an environment that has known only a structured, start-to-finish, planned approach, you will likely encounter resistance. Thus, you will find yourself needing to compromise and adapt your methodological approach, to institute control points we call "traffic cops," and to learn to depict what you are delivering in a way that proponents of the previous "waterfall" methodology will not just understand but also accept.

Many companies are decentralized these days, though the number that are reverting to centralization is increasing. The essence of the centralization/decentralization dance spins around the value of shared services. But it's also about discipline and governance.

The recent downward economic spiral has predictably put IT in the spotlight as a target for cost reduction. As I've noted in past years,1 the fact that IT has historically been viewed as an expense while at the same bearing the expectation of delivering strategic value has caused a long-lasting macro-headache that still plagues corporate IT across all industries.

The thing about a crisis -- and crisis doesn't seem too strong a word for the economic mess right now -- is that it creates a sense of urgency. Actions that once appeared optional suddenly seem essential. Moves that might have been made at a leisurely pace are desired instantly.

-- Gerald F. Seib1

The IT organization gets a triple dose of challenges during a company acquisition:

IT must support the existing technology of the acquired company after the acquisition is completed.

IT must manage the technology transition projects to assimilate part or all of the technology of the target company to the acquiring company.

One important concept about modeling is that models are based on a well-defined set of abstractions, relationships, and constraints. This is true whether the model is of a business process, a software component, or a data structure. However, the underlying concepts are all different, and so we use specialized modeling languages (or notations) to express them.

This is the Cutter Information Technology E-Mail Advisor (that is obvious, but stay with me here). It may not sound right for someone to advise against the use of IT in this forum, but that is what I am going to do.

In the light of the hype over Web 2.0 this past year, I want to stress that organizations are making use of the techniques to improve the collaboration capabilities of their BI and business performance management initiatives.

Agility is the ability to act quickly and with economy of effort in accurate response to change and also to initiate change for business advantage.

Strategic agility as a science, especially the analysis of IT strategic agility, is emerging as we speak and will be moving into the mainstream within a few years. The Internet has dramatically altered how capabilities and firms are knitted together. The technology is more pliable today than just a few decades ago.

There exists an agile scaling myth that goes something like this: "Agile development works well for smaller projects, but doesn't scale to larger ones." Whether because of initially reported agile projects that were small or the XP focus (in early years) on smaller projects, the myth has stuck, as project teams of 50, 100, and 500 have been successful.

Dr. Geary A. Rummler passed away on 29 October 2008. Geary Rummler was the real thing. There were not many people like Geary in business process management. In a world increasingly dominated by radical management ideas and radical technological innovation, Geary was a researcher, writer, and consultant who focused on organizational change, management control, and motivation.

Working on relations between business and IT, we often forget about the most essential problems in this area. Simply by working on models, we lose the real view and the context. It is beneficial to remind ourselves of the essential reasons problems between these two areas exist.

I've been covering business rules management systems (BRMS) for years now. However, I occasionally get the feeling that some still consider BRMS to be some sort of far-out technology. That's "far out" in the way of being too advanced or too out of reach for more mainstream end-user organizations to employ.

A new three-letter acronym has hit the customer relationship management (CRM) market in the past few years: CEM (customer experience management) [1].

It was bound to come. After so many years of focusing on internal CRM processes (how the organization is interested in working with the customer), now it's time to improve the customer's experience in his or her interactions with the organization.

There have been a lot of announcements pertaining to open source BI (e.g., query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards) and data warehousing (data integration, data cleansing, etc.) tools over the past few years. But the big question on everyone's minds remains: to what extent are end-user organizations actually adopting open source BI and data warehousing tools?