A recent Cutter Consortium survey focused on a very important and timely topic: enterprise agility. Enterprise agility calls for structuring the unstructured, for institutionalizing improvisation. It requires that the organization become adept at reacting with speed and precision to changes in the competitive environment, customer needs, and any other change of significant magnitude.

There is an evolving field of consulting expertise built around guiding other consultants in how much they should charge for their services. At once known as "value-based billing," "value-based fees," or some other meme that will likely include the word "value," the thinking around this consulting domain has grown sophisticated enough that some of its principles are highly applicable to IT organizations and the posture they present to their organizations.

Many others and I have written about the necessity for enterprise architecture (EA) to be business-driven. When EA is not firmly grounded in the nature and shape of the business that it is to serve, it is common for a lot of time and resources to be spent on efforts that don't ultimately advance the goals of the business.

"Dwayne, you're good at taking an existing project and executing it. Jim is good at creating projects. I feel it is the best thing to team the two of you."

This is what a senior-level manager named Patrick told me late one afternoon several years ago. I am sure he meant this as a compliment -- something to inspire me on a new job. I felt crippled and left the job within a month.

Where did we disconnect? What happened? What can we learn from this?

There seems to be an ongoing debate as to which data integration technique is best for BI: traditional data warehouse, "dynamic" (i.e., real-time) data warehouse, customer data store, enterprise information integration (EII), or real-time data broker. And the answer is: all of the above. In other words, this debate is pretty much irrelevant.

The most popular Web 2.0 technologies used by organizations to support their business performance management initiatives are wikis and social networks. This finding comes from a January 2008 Cutter Consortium survey of 101 end-user organizations worldwide, which was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing business performance management technologies and techniques.

One big difference between traditional and agile project management is the one between a focus on value and a focus on scope. Value is an outcome. Scope is a characteristic that may help produce value, or may not. Neither a requirement nor a story is valuable unless put to use.

There was a report in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back (see "Analysts Again Are Too Optimistic") about the Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500-stock quarterly earnings index, which missed analysts' expectations for the third quarter in a row.

My friend and colleague on the Cutter Business Technology Council, Lou Mazzucchelli, recently sent around an article that was posted on Ars Technica titled "The promise of Google Apps includes a shrinking IT staff," by Nate Anderson. Anderson writes:

The services area is about both saving money and making money. The key message here is about variety. Whereas just a decade ago there was a limited set of well-understood service packages -- help desk support, data center management, and customer service centers -- today, there's a complete range of services provided by a large number of skilled vendors.

In my last Advisor (see "EAD: The Architecture of the Customer Experience, Part 5," 7 May 2008), I explained how customer interviews, observations, and surveys could help firms understand which parts of the customer experience are in need of repair.

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.

Getting a group of people to move together toward a common objective is never easy. As a project manager dealing with teams of people, each of whom represents different constituents, comes from a different point of view, and is trying to pursue a different set of interests, your task is formidable indeed. Project managers often focus more on task management than on leadership and on keeping track of deliverables and milestones rather than on building relationships and negotiating with their team members.

Organizations are applying a range of analytic techniques to support their business performance management initiatives, according to a January 2008 Cutter Consortium survey of 101 end-user organizations worldwide, which was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing business performance management technologies and techniques.

Every company needs to establish policies to provide the necessary governance for legal, financial, security, and basic operational reasons. For the most part, employees do their best to follow these rules, or they try to work through "the system" to change them if necessary.

One of agile development's touted benefits is better early information on project problems and issues. This early detection enables management -- project and otherwise -- to take adaptive actions. However, early problem detection comes with its own problem: discomfort with early information.

Everyone wants to get a slice of the social networking market. Social networks provide opportunities for large IT enterprises, innovative startups, third-party developers, IT professionals, and venture capitalists. IT businesses now have many new social network-inspired opportunities, some of which are yet to be explored, along different avenues, as follows:

I've run across a writer who has wonderfully smart things to say about art and biology that I think offer a lot of food for thought about innovation.

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.

About a year ago, I was consulting with a client around the organization's SOA offering and its relationship to enterprise architecture. The client, a software provider, had its chief architect in the meeting, and the architect was trying to convince me of the value of the company's solution.

Collaboration is overrated. Nevertheless, collaboration is the cornerstone of Enterprise 2.0. It is considered a truism that collaboration is good, that teams work better than individuals do, and that the brave new world of Enterprise 2.0 is a brave new world of democracy in the workplace, of institutionalized collaborative decision-making.

The idea that collaboration is the answer to every problem may come as some surprise to anyone who has ever served on a committee.

The most popular Web 2.0 technologies used by organizations to support their business performance management initiatives are wikis and social networks. This finding comes from a January 2008 Cutter Consortium survey of 101 end-user organizations worldwide, which was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing business performance management technologies and techniques.

American businessman Warren Buffet once said that "it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

In my last Advisor (see "How to Increase Productive Velocity, Part I," 17 April 2008), I had collected strategies for managers and domain experts to make their agile team run faster. This second article in the series is devoted to measures suitable for the development team.

Discussions surrounding risk management for the last decade have taken on the duality of risk, expressed as threat or opportunity.