"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.

We stressed in our recent Cutter IT Journal article (see "Lessons in Implementing "Green" Business Strategies with ICT," Vol. 21, No. 2) the phenomenal importance of businesses assuming greater responsibility toward the environment than before.

Approximately 24% of end-user organizations indicate they are using data mashups to feed BI, customer relationship management (CRM), and other decision-support applications with data from multiple sources.

Now that the economy is apparently in shambles, it may sound strange to assert that every business now needs to rethink its IT vision. Yet now's the time, for in chaos there often is opportunity.

I was drinking coffee and talking agile with colleague and Cutter Senior Consultant Ken Collier the other morning, and the topic turned to project management or, more precisely, agile project managers.

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.

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

-- Charles Dickens

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

Many of the major trends occurring in the industry are related to technology delivery through alternative forms of outsourcing. Alternative delivery models are all the rage. Software as a service (SaaS), hardware as a service (HaaS), storage as a service, and communications as a service all have a familiar on-demand/pay-by-the-drink ring.

We must remember that a budget is a plan and plans are a stated intention for some future action. In other words, when we plan, we are attempting to make our actions and resources meet some future need or goal.

"Architecture is a verb" -- Anonymous

by Joseph Sarkis, Jacob Park, and Zhaohui Wu