As I write this Advisor in the spring of 2008, the need for enterprise agility is once again a topic on the minds of executives everywhere. Stock market gyrations push prices down 3% one day, up 4% the next. Firms that months before had record profits struggle to stay alive.

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.

All of a sudden, Microsoft seems to be moving aggressively -- at least, aggressively for Microsoft -- into the area of high-level architecture. I have read about this recently with some hope.

What we often call process improvement is actually change management. The fact that most process improvement initiatives fail or disappoint is primarily due to the lack of appreciation for what matters when attempting to drive change in an organization. It has nothing to do with suggesting new practices or telling people what to do.

Data integration tools provider Talend has introduced an open source data profiling toolset. Talend Open Profiler, as the new software is called, rounds out Talend's open source data integration platform by providing tools to help developers evaluate and document the quality of their data.

In the IT world, most things happen in 10-year cycles. However, the evolution of project management (PM) seems to be on a 20-year cycle. The 1960s and 1970s used a consolidated mainframe approach to project management. The 1980s and 1990s saw a more distributed, desktop-oriented PC approach. Today, in the new millennium, we return to the consolidated approach -- but with a difference.

This article is a continuation of last month's Advisor on quality; specifically, intrinsic quality (see "Investigating Agile: Inside and Out," 19 June 2008). Agile development focuses on delivering customer value as its highest priority.

There was a story not too long ago in the Wall Street Journal on the lessons CEOs are trying to learn from the subprime mess and how these lessons might be applied in their own markets [1]. One of the critical lessons the article highlighted was the importance -- and extreme difficulty -- of being able to deliver bad news to senior executives quickly.

Over the last six months, I have interviewed a number of CIOs or IT people that work in large corporations (more than 5,000 people). What I have found is that there is not a rapid adoption of collaboration or Web 2.0 technologies in these organizations.

Negotiators from different cultures differ in numerous ways. The very base concept and attitude toward negotiations vary from an extreme win-lose paradigm in some cultures, in which the assumption is that the other parties are out to beat you and that you can only succeed by limiting the gains you allow them, to win-win, collaborative negotiations in which the goal is to find solutions that meet all parties' interests.

Is yours one of the few organizations that has broken with tradition and hired a new CIO from outside technology? Don't be embarrassed if it is. More are likely to do it, albeit at a slow pace. And if more and more are doing it ... well, it can't be all bad, can it?

Pay attention to this hiring strategy. It speaks gigabytes about the future of one very important aspect of IT management; that is, who oversees it. Let us count the ways.

In the first two Advisors in this series (see "How to Talk to Architects, Part I: The Enterprise," 28 May 2008, and "How to Talk to Architects, Part II: Business and Information," 18 June 2008), we discussed the issues involved in communicating with archi

What are your most valuable assets? For many companies, especially those in the knowledge-based industries, their first response is: "Our people are our most important asset(s)." Interestingly, while for many senior executives this idea may hold true, there is confusion between the business and technical staff in terms of how they -- IT staff members -- are viewed and treated.

I've been doing a lot of research on BI search -- tools that combine the ease of use of enterprise search engines with the reporting and analysis capabilities of BI tools. The goal of BI search is to enable organizations to distribute BI functionality to (nontechnical) business users in a manner that makes self-service BI practical.

I really love maps. I'm something of a map freak. When I was a kid, my folks got me an encyclopedia that had a volume called "Places and People," and I spent whole summers browsing the maps and pictures, trying to get the relationships of those maps and the rest of the globe clear in my mind.

Project management is one thing most businesses have in common. The need to design, develop, manufacture, and market a product is a central thread across the vast expanse of industries. All companies need project management to achieve the goal of producing their next widget. Academic and professional institutions provide an almost immeasurable amount of useful tools and skill-building material on this subject. A careful observer might presume that with all the available knowledge on project management, the majority of projects would be managed effectively.

Physicists speak of dark energy, the label applied to the expansive oomph permeating the universe. The Internet has its own dark energy: the legions of nerds who code for fun, challenge, and uncertain profit. They do not make a business plan or solicit lawyers and VCs before jumping in, and they have no particular political or economic power. Yet they are the ones who developed the Internet in a backwater and declined to patent its protocols.

If you are a frequent traveler or, even more, a road warrior, you will get your full value out of this Advisor in this line: check out a company called TripIt (full disclosure: I have no stock and I do not advise TripIt, but I am writing a very interesting Harvard Business School case on the company).

On the face of it, we all can agree that how a company does its work matters a great deal. The continual interest in reorganizations, the business process reengineering explosion of the 1980s, and the now nearly universal acceptance of the business process and organizational structure as fundamental to good performance give proof to this truth.

If there was ever any doubt as to what Microsoft's strategy regarding Enterprise 2.0 might be, it was shattered with several announcements at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, earlier this month. In a nutshell, Microsoft is moving to become an Enterprise 2.0 leader by taking advantage of its wildly popular SharePoint Server.

It's in our interest as technology professionals to deliver the right message to nontechnology folks in order to help them understand major technology trends, opportunities, and best practices.

Waiting for a train recently, I had a chance to browse through a copy of American Photo magazine. I subscribe to its sister publication, Popular Photography, so I decided to sign up for American Photo as well.

I frequently read articles about outsourcing, benefits, risks, business value, challenges, best practices, concerns, and so on. I wonder whether this information, most of it around success stories, refers to a reality exclusive to American companies, or whether we have the same environment in Latin America.

How many of you come to work each Monday morning determined to perform poor-quality work?

In my last Advisor (see "It's Threat 'AND' Opportunity ... Not 'OR'," 22 May 2008), I discussed the concepts that risk as threat is a natural complement to opportunity, rather than the flip side of it. But I made the point that opportunities exist only if we have an accepting attitude toward them.