Companies seek to concentrate on their value-adding processes and often consider IT infrastructure as a noncore area. Thus, a current trend in the organization of IT departments is outsourcing. When outsourcing, companies aim to reduce cost while getting a better grasp on service-level agreements (SLAs). However, IT -- especially business intelligence (BI) systems -- is becoming a key element for enabling agility in enterprise adaptation to changes in the business environment. This poses a serious challenge to traditional IT outsourcing contracts.

With all of the planning rules and principles we have covered so far in this series, there is only one rule that is always be applicable: once a plan is finished and approved, it is wrong! This is the only thing I have ever guaranteed my stakeholders about a plan. That is because I have found no one prescient enough to be able accurately to predict future events.

Last summer (see "Nurturing the Hidden Architect," 6 June 2007), I wrote about the importance of avoiding a common problem with the establishment of EA programs: namely, that it disempowers some of the very people who understand and have been looking after the "important stuff" that an EA program seeks to address.

Like the ever-present dandelion that seems to take over my lawn each May, we have seen centers of excellence (COEs) popping up all over the IT landscape. And like the persistent weed/flower, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My daughters think the bright yellow adornments to our lawn are "pretty" and simply don't understand why I work so feverishly each year to eradicate them. Likewise with COEs; some IT professionals embrace them, while others scorn them as a blight on the scenery. For many, it's not so much an objection to the COE concept as it is to the term.

No doubt about it: open source BI continues to make inroads with organizations of all makes and sizes. However, one important question surrounding the adoption of open source BI tools is how are end-user organizations actually using them?

Advanced data visualization tools have been around for some time. They first gained a following among scientists and engineers, who used them to build models for fluid-flow analysis, aerodynamic simulation, and other complex applications involving large data sets with many cause-and-effect variables.

With so much talk about the management of innovation, we have lost sight of something more important: innovation in management. When innovative products wow us, innovators of those products receive our praise and adulation. It is a time-honored tradition as old as civilization itself. After all, every age will have its Michelangelo.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines concrete as "an actual, specific thing or instance." Chip and Dan Heath (in Made to Stick ) state that "even the most abstract business strategy must eventually show up in the tangible actions of human beings." Concreteness, they say, is an indispensable component of sticky idea

In my last Trends Advisor ("Is Parallel Computing the Next Big Thing?" 17 July 2008), I discussed the hardware trend toward an increasing emphasis on parallel computing.

Behavioral economics has emerged as the hot subspecialty in the dismal science today. While traditional economic theory assumed people were always rational actors in their decision making, from our experience in IT investments, we know otherwise. What can behavioral economics tell us about how to avoid the pathologies that creep into IT investment decision making and destroy value creation?

Philosophers and scientists have been speculating about the operation of the human mind for at least 2,500 years. In recent years, the knowledge of how our minds actually process information has increased rapidly due to the research of neurologists, psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists.

Almost all organizations have some level of ability to see a snapshot of how their organization is faring on a regular basis. That ability allows them to keep an eye on how well the organization is meeting its objectives on a daily or sometimes even a real-time basis. These dashboards typically cover the organization's financial data at the very least and often extend into monitoring of production line outputs and related metrics.

IBM has announced it is buying business rules management systems (BRMS) vendor ILOG for Euro 215 million (approximately US $340 million). This deal is important because it gives IBM a leading BRMS it can use to add rule-based management and complex decision-processing capabilities to a range of IBM products and services.

Users are not interested in programs. If they are, it is our fault. What users want is systems that produce needed outputs with the minimum of additional input and with the maximum of integration (or the ability to integrate) with other systems with which they share data.

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.

I've noted an overwhelming trend in the last year or so related to managers' unwillingness to ask questions of their senior management about risk. The trend seems to be rooted in plain old-fashioned fear.

One of the most important things that an IT executive must remember is where the money that pays for new equipment, IT employee salaries, software licenses, and so on, comes from. When I pose this question to senior managers, the reply I most often get has to do with budgets or overhead. While technically correct, these answers don't get to the heart of the question.

Any IT manager worth his or her salt can give you at least a dozen reasons why waterfall methods are passé. Yet the semicontractual specification that is the usual result of requirements engineering is clearly a waterfall artifact. What flows over the waterfall is the spec.

A client asks about methods to increase the trust between IT and business managers and staff. It seems the relationship is currently broken: business managers don't trust IT, and the feeling is mutual.

I just attended the Architecture and Design World 2008 conference in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was an exciting collection of 300-plus architects and designers with an array of about 75 talks that provided a good representation of what's of current interest to software architects and designers.

A common business adage these days is that "if you don't move forward, you will fall behind." This is reasonable, in a sense. There is a good chance that in a competitive environment, maintaining the status quo internally will give others an opportunity to make advances and leave you in the dust. In effect, you indeed fall backward.

I have a problem with this, in that it implies that our approach should be to aggressively stay ahead of the competition in order to survive.

Microsoft has announced it is acquiring data warehousing appliance specialist DATAllegro, Inc. Microsoft plans to convert DATAllegro's massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehousing appliances to work with the Microsoft SQL Server database.

In far too many organizations, bureaucracy is an inherent impediment to success.

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" -- commonly attributed to novelist E.M. Forster

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