I recall a conference presentation titled "Software engineering? An Oxymoron?" that I attended about five years ago. The speaker was pushing the idea that the software development practice had to borrow concepts from the engineering domain, where the formal approach in design and build was a common practice consolidated over 2,000 years.

A US healthcare company CIO and his core IT team have been using an agile development approach in their projects for just about a year now. When I came across this company last year, the CIO and most of his key team members were getting ready to support the rollout of 10 large-scale systems-integration projects across the enterprise.

While teaching a class recently, I had a few minutes to chat with a corporate VP about his forays into risk management. His name is Ira Brackman, and he passed along a copy of an article he wrote almost 11 years ago for a short-lived publication called Year 2000 (focusing on the computer world's Year 2000 crisis).

At a conference recently, a group of approximately 100 people had just witnessed an impressive demo of a mature application development environment. At the end of the session, there was a question-and-answer session. At one point, a fellow at the back of the room asked, "Isn't that like a CASE tool?" I was acting as the moderator, and I wasn't sure how to respond.

A year ago I argued in an Advisor that sourcing was about to get more strategic (see "Sourcing Is Getting More Strategic," 7 March 2007). That is, going forward, organizations would source more strategic business processes other than just IT service functions. I have concluded that even this definition is too limiting. Strategic sourcing can mean the sourcing of such functions as R&D, product development, or supply chain, but really should mean far more.

We've gotten very interested in the issues that led to project development success or failure. A simple Google search on "why do projects fail" leads to many hundreds of sites that offer advice about what leads to failure and what to do about it. Presumably, this leads to project success.

Last September, I discussed the latest Web 2.0-related development to make its way into the corporate world: mashups, which (as defined by Wikipedia) are Web applications that can combine data from more than one source into an "integrated experience." The aim of using mashups is similar to other Web

Enterprise IT leaders who seek customer value from a master data management (MDM) project [1] can find themselves in a Catch 22. They can't put all development on hold while they wait for a full enterprise data model to be developed and approved, yet they know anything that is developed in the interim will be subject to a costly, lengthy, and, quite possibly, ugly remediation when the new standard is available.

A debate is going on as to what actually constitutes "business performance management" and how it differs from so-called "traditional" BI. Because a number of readers have contacted me regarding this subject, I've decided to make it the topic of this week's Advisor.

So much emphasis has been placed on negotiation in outsourcing contracts that an inexperienced person could believe it is the pinnacle of the outsourcing lifecycle and involves the greatest amount of work and the greatest risk of signing a bad contract. If it does become the pinnacle, then something has gone seriously wrong in an earlier stage.1

As more organizations face transitions to agile methods and those transitions involve larger segments of those organizations, the need for transition or transformation strategies increases.

In my last Trends Advisor (see "What Was Microsoft Thinking?" 6 March 2008), I took Microsoft to task for its latest set of mainline products, particularly Word 2007.

As always, I'm riding a bunch of hobby horses, but none so often as the difference I think I see between innovation as it relates to particular products, services, or ideas, and innovation as it relates to the great changes that are shuffling their feet in the wings, ready to come on stage and change our lives.

Business-IT alignment is often approached as a discrete goal to be achieved in a specific moment in time, as opposed to a continuous organizational process. This discrete one-off perspective creates the illusion that, if properly managed, an alignment initiative will lead to the desired final state of having the IT system fully aligned with the business needs.

It is clear that the EA landscape is changing. For many practitioners, EA has transformed over the past few years from a set of strategic principles (originated at the ivory towers) to become an essential set of business-driven blueprints (used at the ground level) for their enterprise solutions.

In the December 2007 Cutter IT Journal covering Enterprise 2.0, I took the contrarian view that adding collaboration computing capabilities to the business environment is not sufficient to define a next generation of the enterprise (see "Attributes of the Next-Generation Enterprise"). Unlike the other authors, I described a number of attributes of the enterprise that will need to change.

What if someone established a blog whose sole purpose was to engage disgruntled consumers in a running commentary about how lousy your company's customer service is and to tell people to "do themselves a favor" and avoid buying, banking, renting, etc., from your business? Or what about a video on YouTube that slams your company's product?

As Tony Paoni of Diamond Consulting likes to remind his listeners, the new networked economy is not just the old industrial economy with a mess of wires hanging off it. Even mass-produced consumer products like detergent, bread, and soft drinks, or traditional consumer durables like automobiles, are changing.

It has become popular to enter the agile world using a shortcut: you send a few of your more-promising young managers to a two-day course where they learn about how to manage an agile team and how to plan an agile iteration.

According to the results of a recent Cutter survey on IT trends for 2008 (see Cutter Benchmark Review , Vol. 8, No. 1), IS security continues to be a challenge for companies. We are seeing a trend develop in the way companies implement intrusion detection.

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.

-- Albert Einstein

I've been working with many companies lately whose IT systems are dominated by enterprise resource planning (ERP). This is not surprising, since an ERP system is an essential part of most IT portfolios today. In many organizations, the ERP system contributes as much as 70% of the total IT capability.

Leveraging ROI as a key service-level agreement (SLA) target in IT services contracts for some is an innovative use of a not-so-very-innovative financial technique. Innovations are often startling, and some service providers are likely to find it so. Consider it anyway.

In previous Cutter articles and reports, I have often referred to the business manager's challenge of managing stakeholder expectations. Who are stakeholders? They are shareholders, board directors, employees, customers, vendors, community agencies, investment analysts, and government agencies -- in short, anyone who has a stake in the performance of the company.

For organizations struggling with their master data management (MDM) strategies, underway or planned, the solution for success may not lie in better technical justifications or in more concrete ROI discussions, but in a better customer service and IT marketing strategy.