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.

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."

-- Charles Dickens

The good news: The American presidential election is finally over.

When I wrote my last Advisor, "An Agile View of Software Engineering" (16 October 2008), I did not expect to start such an intense discussion as it turned out to be. The reactions were intense both in terms of quantity and of quality -- a deep discussion on the relationship between software engineering and agile.

A close professional ally of mine, LeRoy Ward, recently completed the third edition of his Dictionary of Project Management Terms. At the same time (and on a seemingly unrelated note), our family adopted two kittens.

Recently, I was chatting with a couple of CIOs about virtualization in the data center.

"We're about 40% virtualized," one CIO said.

"We're up to about 30%. We hope to get to 80% by the end of the year," said the other.

There are many buyers and sellers of outsourcing services in the developed countries. Buyers have choices with whom to buy and under what conditions. Sellers are free to choose their clients and what to charge.

I've been conversing with colleagues. Some are CIOs in traditional industries, some are entrepreneurs, some are in nonprofits, some in international businesses, and some smack dab in the middle of the financial meltdown. Some are front-line managers, some are middle-level, and some are precariously high. They can feel the ground shaking.

Following a recent keynote by a service-oriented architecture (SOA) evangelist, who waxed lyrical about the business promises of SOA at an enterprise architecture conference, one delegate commented, "I have a fundamental issue with people who say that SOA is a way of doing business -- it is not; it is a way of engineering IT applications."

The business world could not be in more crisis. What has led to this? Who caused it? Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is to blame? How do we deal with it? These are some of the questions that are running through most of our minds.

Back in March, I discussed the need for tools that can mine social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook (see "Mining Internet Social Media: Tomorrow's Tools Needed Today," 18 March 2008). Basically, I said that social media sites have become one of the leading mediums for publishing content on the Web.

The last eight weeks have been fascinating to watch -- at least from a cold-eyed appraisal perspective of how ineffective risk mitigation efforts have been in slowing down -- let alone stopping -- the financial contagion that has spread across the globe.

A large part of the problem has been, of course, the failure to recognize that there was a financial contagion cooking in the Wall Street financial jungle. Like the beginnings of a pandemic that is not recognized, once the contagion started to take hold, it was just too late.

While much has been written about organizational learning and knowledge, it is still a mystery for many firms. The old school of planning and designing change is under attack. One could argue that planning, especially long-term planning, does not improve agility. For environments that are dynamic and complex, events can unfold in unpredictable ways, upsetting even the best plans.

Some people seem to have their best ideas in the shower; mine seem to come on bike rides. In thinking further about leadership traits (in an earlier Advisor), I realized I needed to add a third.

For the IT community, the incoming US administration could be a very interesting one.

Whatever gets built must be maintained or replaced.

-- Ken Orr

One common aspect of an enterprise architecture program is the use of an EA repository. While this can be an important and integral part to the value that architecture brings to an organization, it can also be a trap. Like most business solutions, technology alone is never the answer.