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

In the August 2007 Cutter IT Journal, I wrote an article titled "Beyond Collaboration to Action as a Service." In that article, Dave Gibson and I put forward a vision where more than just people enable collaboration.

When I teach architecture courses, one of the things that I try to convey to the class is the different levels of complexity/interconnectedness/theory that exist within architecture. It is not the goal of the course to make people experts at metamodels, but it is important for an architect to understand that architecture is founded on architecture of its own.

In December, I discussed several trends and developments in "mobile BI" -- the ability to view and interact with performance-related information on mobile devices like smartphones and PDAs (see "Business Performance Management and Mobile BI," 26 December 2007).

What Is Personal Agility? Personal agility has two major components, the first of which is "personal responsibility." Let's start there.

One of the great things about working with Cutter Consortium is that I get to work with a lot of really smart people. One of those people is Mike Rosen, who is the Enterprise Architecture Practice Director for Cutter as well as a Senior Consultant.

collaboration = innovation

Last November, I said that Oracle would more than likely end up buying BEA Systems (see "Oracle and BEA: Fusion Confusion or Beneficial to End-User Organizations?" 14 November 2007). I added that my initial reaction to this possible acquisition was that it would be good for Oracle.

In my previous Advisor ("The Architecture of the Customer Experience, Part 1," 2 January 2008), I produced the beginnings of an ontology that is useful for thinking about how customers interact with firms.

On 16 December 2007, USA Today published an article on "CEO's bold experiment: Management by Democracy" and provided a commentary of Q&A sessions with HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayar. The article is about the creation of workplaces using democracy and how corporate management leverages employees for the governance of business. I really enjoyed reading the excerpts of the interview.

Many IT managers are seeking to reliably forecast and estimate projects.

Last week, Sun Microsystems announced it would buy leading open source database developer MySQL for approximately US $1 billion. This deal did not receive as much attention as it should have because it happened at the same time Oracle announced it would buy BEA Systems. Nevertheless, it is important.

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.

If you get a chance, you ought to tune in to Cutter Senior Consultant Michael Mah's Cutter Webinar titled "Case Study: The Impact of Agile on Productivity at Five Companies." [This morning, January 17, at 11:30 EST -- you can still register now or watch the recording at a later date.] I've been working with

As Sarbanes-Oxley commands management awareness and efficacy, organizations are looking for systems that will make sure they are working in the best interests of their shareholders. One system that is taking hold both in the private and public sector (after more than 40 years of application) is the earned value management system (EVMS).

For the past few years, I've started out the new year of Advisors with some suggestions for resolutions. To continue with this popular feature and as a service to Enterprise Architecture Advisor readers, here again is a list of ready-made resolutions that you can adopt for 2008.

In my last Advisor (see "Principles of Planning, Part 6: When and How?" 26 December 2007), I introduced the topic of effective communication and its importance as a critical factor for successful implementation of business initiatives. In this Advisor, I'll dive a little deeper into this topic.

Vendors have been offering on-demand BI and other analytic and data management solutions since 2000, though at that time they were typically referred to as analytic or business intelligence ASPs. Many of these pioneers focused on offering hosted applications and services for analyzing data associated with e-commerce companies.

We have advanced the practice of managing IT projects in the past handful of decades. Understanding the origin of the advances can help pass them along to new project managers.

In the last year or two, I've become very interested in cyberflexing. Because I'm a member of a National Academy of Sciences study (in progress) on the subject of "Ethical and Political Implications of Offensive Information Operations," I must mention that what I'm saying here are personal opinions on many of the issues and not conclusions of the study group.

Last week, Microsoft announced plans to acquire enterprise search software specialist Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) for 6.6 billion Norwegian Kroners, or approximately US $1.2 billion. This deal is important because it gives Microsoft high-end, cutting-edge search technology it can use to bolster its low- and medium-end search products.

If you do agile planning, you probably use the "yesterday's weather" metaphor of Extreme Programming: your team collects the backlog of stories or features, sorts them by priority, and estimates them -- let's say, using story points. Then you take the "velocity" -- the sum of story points finished during the last iteration(s).

The Web has not yet reached its full potential; it's a moving post.

collaboration = innovation

After listening, naturally comes talking. (Alas, it's all too often the other way around.) Collaboration requires four broad categories of talking. I'll take up two of them today, two more next time.

As we all know, enterprise architecture (EA) is not a technical affair; it is not just for the technologists and architects to demonstrate the technical marvels in developing IT solutions or services for the business world. Instead, EA is now the widely regarded conduit for developing a collaborative environment for both business and IT.