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.

To ban or not to ban social networks at workplaces is an ongoing dilemma facing many CIOs, IT directors, and senior executives in numerous organizations. Despite the growing popularity and potential benefits that can be gained by embracing social networks for business applications, more companies are blocking access to social-networking sites.

The majority of organizations that have implemented or are planning to implement business performance management solutions rely on a data warehouse to support the data integration requirements of their performance management initiatives. This finding comes from a Cutter Consortium survey conducted in January 2008 of 101 end-user organizations based worldwide.

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.

I finally broke down last weekend and brought a new laptop, powered by Microsoft's Vista operating system. I had reached the end of the line with my old Sony laptop. Some of you are familiar with my old machine, which played a part in a series of Trends Advisors about working around problems.

Diversity management is a double mistake. Instead, the art to master is difference and leadership. Difference leadership is based in an ethic that recognizes the other as other and accepts (if not welcomes/embraces) her or his otherness as fully valid and equal. Apart from being based in the ethics of difference, it is also a leadership guided by a politics of curiosity before the capability of people.

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.

Arguing that one piece of the process guidance in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is more important than another is like arguing the same about one piece in a jigsaw puzzle. The complementary nature of ITIL and jigsaw puzzles tells us that each piece contributes equally to the whole and each part must be treated with equal care. So, in the name of equality, we'll dispense with "important" and go with the more awkward "symbolically transformational" to argue the following.

In the October 2007 Cutter IT Journal, I contributed an article to the special issue on "Fostering Innovation: What Role Does Agile Software Development Play?" That article, titled "Agile and UCD: Can This Marriage Be Saved?," presented a case study of a company that went from waterfall to agile, with the loss of usability testing as an unexpected outcome. In its place, the product manager stood in for the customer/user.

Artificial intelligence (my definition): AI is technology based on the study of human cognition and problem-solving capabilities. Examples of such human cognitive skills include speech recognition, decision making, visual recognition, problem solving, deductive and inductive reasoning, and signal processing.