The myth surrounding agile projects goes something like this: a small team of developers who can handle any coding task (database, business logic, user interface, middleware, etc.) works hand-in-hand with the end user who talks with the development team about the details of the work requirements. The small-team-filled-with-generalists model may work for some small projects, but it doesn't scale.

Population Estimates of Three Generations of Workers

Generation

Birth Year

As companies become comfortable using agile methods, larger and larger projects are being undertaken. While the myth, "agile is only good for small projects," is being proved wrong every day, there are still a number of issues that need to be addressed in order to scale agile -- in two dimensions, up and out.

With 2009 looming large, ugly, and just around the corner, it's time for the obligatory prognostications. Boy, is this difficult.... Hmmm. What will next year bring? Any wild guesses?

Rather than focus on the dark clouds, I am going to first look for the silver lining ahead.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

In a meeting today with a client, people were talking continually about how the IT organization and business have to improve their collaboration. The business feels a considerable amount of pain about the lack of collaboration with IT, and IT in turn is feeling some pain collaborating with the business during a transition to agile.

I've recently been observing a group of people attempting to develop a local food system for their community. What strikes me is that the principles of enterprise architecture (EA) that I've learned and used over the years are entirely relevant to this endeavor, despite the fact that IT has no role in it whatsoever.

Y2K was great for IT housekeeping. It forced us into answering the question: do we make that application compliant, or can we toss it? Well, we are almost nine years past Y2K, and I am finding that during this period many organizations have been concentrating on adding new functionality, and rarely changing it, let alone replacing it.

Almost one-quarter of end-user organizations indicate that they currently have operational BI applications deployed and in use.

The debate constantly comes up about the role of an architect and whether or not he or she should write code as part of a project team.

Which of the following is a worse problem?

The developers have started using agile practices, but managers are not on board.

A project manager institutes agile practices for his or her project, and only some of the developers and testers go along with it.

It has been a month since I wrote the first part of this Advisor in which I suggested that governments may need to understand the underlying sources of financial risk before they kick off yet another rescue plan (see "Before Moving to Another Rescue Plan, Review Your Risks," 6 November 2008).

Last month, Grafton County, New Hampshire (USA), Treasurer Carol Elliott lost her bid for a fourth term to Vanessa Sievers.

Everyone has a perspective about return on investment (ROI). Lots of calculations, models, and algorithms allegedly precisely measure the impact of alternative technology investments. There is strategic ROI and tactical ROI; there is "soft" ROI and "hard" ROI. There are as many ROIs out there as there are RBIs in the major league. What do we make of the ROI smorgasbord?

In working with a client recently, we made the point that getting and keeping business involvement in any aspect of IT governance is a serious difficulty. We noted that this is true for every client with which we've worked over the last 25 years.

In this case, this understanding allowed us to lead this client to the following "three-phase" approach to successfully gaining management involvement, focusing on portfolio management for applications and infrastructure services as a start.

Eight or nine years ago, I was working to design a state-of-the-art collaborative travel agent (CTA) system to help struggling travel agencies stem the loss of customers, especially their high-end business customers.

If you've been succeeding with agile in your organization for a while, you've experienced projects that make more visible progress, are done earlier, and provide a high level of satisfaction for everyone involved.

During the past year, high-performance analytic databases have received a fair amount of attention in the IT press.

The concept of knowledge management (KM) has been around for 25 years and is known to most business practitioners. KM, as practiced by competent enterprises and here, is defined as:

Innovation is a buzzword that has been overused during the last few years. The sad truth is that almost everyone would like to be innovative, but only a few can be. The good thing is that many could be much more creative than they are; it only requires establishing values and the borders of an environment within which such creativity is possible.

The myth surrounding agile projects goes something like this: a small team of developers who can handle any coding task (database, business logic, user interface, middleware, etc.) works hand-in-hand with the end user who talks with the development team about the details of the work requirements.

The history of American politics is punctuated with a variety of technological breakthroughs that changed the course of elections and, as a result, of government policies for decades. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt was able, through the magic of a new medium (radio), to speak directly to millions more people than ever before.

Many IT shops suffer from chronic organizational distress. I'm sure you have seen the patient before. The complaints from stakeholders inside the firm typically are:

Insufficient customer-service orientation

Failure to adequately show an interest in understanding the business

Not enough capacity to tackle the important projects queued up

Earlier this month, Gartner issued a press release saying that SOA adoption is falling dramatically. With the election finally over, news is slow, and it seems everyone and his or her uncle has jumped on this revelation with something to say on the topic. Not wanting to be left out of the party, I feel it my duty to chime in. Of course, I'm not unbiased.

All want to reduce risk when they make decisions. IT organizations invest a great deal in the decision process of new technologies. In the ideal world, before deciding on strategic technology, IT organizations conduct a comprehensive proof of concept (POC) and also talk or, preferably, visit several references. In a less-than-ideal world, however -- the one we all know -- IT organizations do not have all the resources for the decision-making process.

Approximately 10% of end-user organizations indicate they are using enterprise information integration technology to support their BI efforts. This finding comes from a recent Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in October 2008) of 85 end-user organizations based worldwide.