As enterprise architects, we often face tasks aligning business and IT. One approach to this alignment is characterized by the Parker-Benson Square Wheel. It tells us that there are two sides to this equation. IT aligns technology with the business by responding to changes in business strategy and operations. This is the traditional role of IT.

When I'm away on vacation, one of my favorite activities is to rummage through old record albums at the flea market, looking for some long, lost treasure from my youth. On one such expedition last summer, I ran across Steve Martin's comedy album Let's Get Small. Pleased by my rare find, I gladly paid my 50 cents, brought the record home, and then completely forgot about it until it surfaced as I was looking for another album last week.

There have been a number of developments over the past few months involving open source data integration platforms. One of the most interesting of these is Talend's open source data quality suite. Another is the version 2.0 release of Jitterbit's open source data integration toolset.

When I've been involved with clients trying to establish an EA function, they usually fall into one of two categories: either they basically have no architecture occurring at the enterprise level, or they have a fairly new practice in place with a handful of people having some amount of experience and/or knowledge of architecture.

In most organizations adopting agile methods, the techniques used for program and portfolio management are still predictive and "waterfall": yearly budgeting cycles and capacity planning, and heavily matrixed resource management. It's no surprise then that despite adopting agile methods for their projects, many organizations have yet to exploit their full benefits at the portfolio level.

The odds of that? That's like being struck by lightning.

Is it? Is it really?

The English language is rife with metaphors. We do comparisons and analogies on a ritual basis. However, when the topic arises, I'm reminded of a college mate of mine, Jack Shepherd, who used to challenge similes on a regular basis.

Some years ago, I was working on a data warehousing project for a large bank in the US state of Texas, where one of my roles was reviewing the data model that the users and consultants were coming up with. I was charging a fairly high rate, for that time anyway, and the user manager became a little concerned that he was being billed for my work but hadn't seen me around much.

During a recent Cutter Business Technology Council meeting, we hashed over the "Moat" opinion for nearly two hours. I went into the meeting thinking the matter was a slam dunk: yes, there's a culture clash, and no, management shouldn't hunker down and enforce the old outdated rules. To my surprise, there was almost instantly a lot of heat in the room, with Council members differing markedly on how management should respond. I came away feeling that there were no good choices in this complicated matter, only bad and less bad ones.

While it can be very personally rewarding to learn about other cultures and interact with people from different places, from a project management perspective, these factors must be thought of as risks that should be actively mitigated and monitored. The business impact leads to, as a general rule, increased costs and schedule or product delivery delays.

Traditionally, the main purpose in building a business case for an IT project is to obtain approval for the financial spend. However, in addition to obtaining funding for the investment, the preparation of comprehensive and robust business cases provides organizations with other important advantages.

Last month, I discussed cloud computing -- what it is and key issues that end-user organizations should carefully consider when evaluating its use, including reliability/availability, security, and data integration and integrity (see "Cloud Computing Cranks it Up, But Issues Remain," 23 July 2008).

During a recent Cutter Business Technology Council meeting, we hashed over the "Moat" opinion for nearly two hours. I went into the meeting thinking the matter was a slam dunk: yes, there's a culture clash, and no, management shouldn't hunker down and enforce the old outdated rules. To my surprise, there was almost instantly a lot of heat in the room, with Council members differing markedly on how management should respond. I came away feeling that there were no good choices in this complicated matter, only bad and less bad ones.

The number of data warehousing appliances on the market -- prepackaged hardware/software offerings that combine database, data storage, compute servers, and operating systems preconfigured and pretuned to support data warehousing -- continues to grow. The latest vendor to introduce a data-warehousing appliance is Sybase, Inc.

Beyond all doubt, the trend to outsource functions developed inside an enterprise or a government agency is at its peak. This phenomenon is not limited to IT; it's under consideration in several areas of an organization. Although outsourcing is a very appealing concept, it is essential for a company to be properly prepared for this kind of change.

Before there was the principle of open source to manage innovation, there was the open market to achieve the same innovation and agility objectives. Open source innovation attracts the bulk of the attention today, which is why open market innovation deserves another look. The IT organization should join in because of the role it can play in enabling this approach to innovation.

This is a continuation of previous Advisors on quality, specifically ones on intrinsic quality (see "Investigating Agile: Inside and Out," 19 June 2008 and "Intrinsic Quality?" 3 July 2008).

Looking at a software catalog, we see hundreds or even thousands of software titles. There are accounting systems, HR systems, manufacturing systems, personal productivity systems -- you name it. With so many systems out there, we would expect that it would be difficult to categorize all of them. However, from the point of view of a for-profit organization, the categorization is very straightforward. There are four.

Humans have, for many years, used IT and IS to enhance their environment and to learn about their surroundings. We have invented such information technologies as printing and such information systems as publishing to disseminate knowledge. In the process, we have created practices that in the long run and on a large scale damage this same environment (e.g., converting trees to paper).

I recently participated in a discussion about architecture frameworks and standards. While there are many frameworks -- such as Zachman, FEAF, and DoDAF -- only TOGAF qualifies as an official standard. By "official," I mean that it is created, published, and maintained by an accredited standards organization.

I recently stumbled upon a book by Thomas Craughwell about urban legends [1]. While reading Craughwell's book, I realized that I have been the victim of urban legends at work. Someone (sometimes me) has taken a legend as truth, acted on it, and had it end badly. Understanding what is legend and what is truth can help when managing IT and other work.

Here are three urban legends I've encountered at work and how they either backfired on me or caused me grief when trying to manage projects.

An interesting BI development trend that I believe is beginning to receive more interest from organizations is embedded, or "process-aware," analytics.

Back in the 1980s, and even recently, some have claimed that investments in IT haven't paid off [1, 2]. Fortunately, much research in the past decade has started to explain the complex relationship between IT and advantage and has shown, rather compellingly, that investments in IT do matter [3].

"We really like your proposal, but this idea to take the whole team into a one-day workshop every month -- 'retrospective' was what you called it? -- and have a three-day workshop each quarter is by far too expensive!" If I had a hit list of discussions I have had with managers over the last five years, this would probably be number one.

Quick, who was Ownit Mortgage Solutions?

Give up? Well, it was a US state of California company, one of the top 15 subprime mortgage companies, and it went bankrupt -- in early December 2006.

The financial company Merrill Lynch had a 15% stake in Ownit and, at the time, a few insightful commentators (mainly outside the US) asked whether Ownit was the canary in the US subprime mortgage coal mine. Looking back, it apparently was, although few financial institutions paid much attention to Ownit's demise, including Merrill Lynch.

In the last couple of Advisors (see "Is Parallel Computing the Next Big Thing?" 17 July 2008 and "What's the Next Big Thing?