Many end-user organizations have multiple enterprise content management (ECM) products in use due to specific application requirements and as the result of mergers and acquisitions. To date, however, integrating these different platforms has often required custom coding or use of specific adapters.

For years, employees who have used Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to find information on the Web frequently ask why searching for and accessing the information they really need to perform their jobs at their own organizations is so difficult.

Data warehouse vendor Infobright Inc. has introduced an open source version of its Infobright enterprise data warehouse product. Infobright Community Edition (ICE), as the new open source offering is called, is similar to the company's main commercial data warehousing package: Infobright Data Warehouse Enterprise Edition.

With an almost evangelical fervor surrounding it, the steady flow of rhetoric concerning alignment of IT with the business side of the organization assumes that if the IT organization pushes for it, business units will enthusiastically embrace it. Often, this is not true, and IT managers must prepare for those occasions when the technology organization is truly ready to transform how it interacts with business units when everyone else isn't.

In this Advisor, I'll offer a few suggestions to firms contemplating how open inflows and outflows might fit into their own innovation strategies.

Recently, the CIO of a non-IT company approached me to help him transform his organization to agile. "We have this tool that provides a real competitive advantage to our domain experts and our clients, but now success haunts us.

Recently, I had a conversation with a senior VP of software engineering who said that certain "macroeconomic trends" were going to influence the direction of his software development strategy. Reading between the lines: the CFO was going to cut budgets in the face of the current economic downturn.

We have covered a lot of material since the first Advisor in this series was published. Now it's time for a review.

In the first part of this series (see "Collaboration: What Does It Mean? Part I," 3 September 2008), we discussed the opportunities provided by new technologies in creating business value with collaboration.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) looks and sounds very technical. The word "architecture" certainly makes it sound technical, and the fact that it is "service-oriented" makes it sound even more mysterious. So, it is no wonder that SOA is viewed as an IT-driven initiative.

Last week, I discussed how I saw Web 2.0 and search affecting BI (see "Web 2.0, Search, and the Future of Business Intelligence," 9 September 2008). Basically, I said that one of the most important technologies that will have a major influence on BI is search; specifically, the blending of BI and enterprise search technologies.

It is the norm today for the IT shop to be, or have the potential to be, a boundary-spanning function. Organizational theory has long recognized that within the firm there are areas whose focus is mostly internal (e.g., manufacturing and operations) and others whose role is to connect the organization to its outside environment, exchanging information and resources (e.g., R&D, marketing).

The subtitle of Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck's groundbreaking book, is "Embrace Change." The full range of behaviors that this seemingly simple phrase can be affect are in fact very far-reaching.

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One CAN'T believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

In the current edition of Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (CACM), there is an extremely important article for everyone involved in mission-critical software. The article is titled "Software Engineering and Formal Methods" and is written by a number of illustrious software scientists.

Compared to home-location development teams that may be colocated with domain experts and business champions, software developers at the (offshore) work location are not likely to be familiar with your business. They are learning the details of the business as they code up the application. Even with well-written requirements documentation, don't assume that the team will understand what should be built. Furthermore, intricate business rules and relationships among data elements can be particularly hard to convey.

With an almost evangelical fervor surrounding it, the steady flow of rhetoric concerning alignment of IT with the business side of the organization assumes that if the IT organization pushes for it, business units will enthusiastically embrace it. Often this is not true, and IT managers must prepare for those occasions when the technology organization is truly ready to transform how it interacts with business units when everyone else isn't.

With all the discussions of "levels of abstraction" in the systems modeling literature, there has not been enough discussion of what kind of abstraction those of us involved in enterprise architecture (EA) should be doing.

In the Web 2.0 consumer world, social networks are very hot. In the enterprise, people are still struggling with tracking down expertise and getting it applied to projects. However, there are some new tools in the project manager's arsenal.

We're hearing increasingly about the use of Web 2.0 techniques -- including mashups, social networks, wikis, blogs, maps, and search -- with BI. There have also been several interesting developments recently regarding Web 2.0 and BI.

Customer collaboration is a cornerstone of agile development, but it is also one of the more difficult aspects of implementing agile. Of course, lack of customer involvement isn't unique to agile development -- software developers have had problems in this area ever since software entered organizational life.

Business and art are two -- or some would argue, the -- primary sites where innovation happens in our societies. They are, however, also structurally ordered into a dichotomy that often has business on the "useful" side and art on the "amusement" side.

"Many project managers [PMs] still find the complexity of planning and delivering projects in a constantly changing environment often requires competencies that their formal training has not equipped them with," notes Guest Editor Rob Thomsett, in the May 2008 Cutter IT Journal issue's call for papers.

While often the "Green Revolution" in IT consists of well-intentioned projects to minimize damage to the environment, a darkening trend in the data center could transform fluffy and fuzzy corporate environmental attitudes into a more focused, bottom-line disposition where energy strategy becomes a key component of disciplined IT management.

Last month, we wrote an Advisor titled "Is Our IT Superior to the Competition's? No???" It was triggered by the just-published Cutter Benchmark Review article (see "Linking IT Budgeting, Governance, and Value," Vol. 8, No. 7), in which we report that only 27% of managers of large companies believe their IT is superior to that of their competition.