We engaged a client's business executive team members this week in an extended conversation about their priorities and plans for IT. The discussion focused on their key issue: how to think about their need for ongoing IT investments, meaning maintenance and support of their application portfolio.

India is one of the powerhouse countries of this century -- of that there can be little doubt. Its huge and diverse population is a growing opportunity, and the country''s highly skilled, business-savvy workforce makes it an attractive business partner. As companies increasingly beat a well-trodden path to India's shores, many are finding that doing business in India is not as simple as signing contracts and producing products.

Faced with more opportunities for the use of technology than there are resources available for their simultaneous development, organizations are faced with the task of prioritizing or ranking opportunities. Often organizations use a single ranking factor, such as ROI (return on investment).

Because customer data breaches continue to make headlines almost every week, it seems appropriate to ask how much of a financial hit an organization should expect to take should it suffer such an incident.

Happy New Year! I wish everyone a terrific 2008. May you realize success in all your projects and endeavors.

Last week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) complied with a US congressional request that the space agency release the findings from a four-year airline-safety study it conducted involving thousands of interviews -- including those with 24,000 pilots. The trouble is, NASA released the information in a format that makes it all but impossible to analyze further.

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 agile methods are to go mainstream, it might be when their popularity and legitimacy reach a tipping point.

As we begin 2008, I thought it would be useful to review a couple of stories from last year that might provide some added motivation for those of you resolving that this is the year you're going to get your organization to take enterprise risk management seriously.

I believe that traditional EA teams are set up to fail from the very beginning. Not on purpose, mind you, but more due to a lack of understanding of the realities of modern software development. The EA teams I've seen would often produce white papers and models that the developers would never read or, if they did read them, would soon forget.

The connection between IT investments and success with the customers who pay the firm money is often indirect, ambiguous, and difficult to establish.

In our last Advisor (see "The Nuts & Bolts of Work Made for Hire: Part 1," 19 December 2007), we began an examination of the concept of work made for hire, which will continue in this Advisor with the requirements of a work made for hire arrangement and some negotiating strategies for successful work made for hire arrangements.

Over the last few years, I have observed a trend in the way IT management and governance work with the business. During the late 1990s (in the dot-com era), IT and business organizations started working closely with each other.

Of all the areas in which technologists can make strong contributions, business intelligence (BI) is at the top of my list. After all, BI solutions touch people who make decisions. They are a primary means, a sensory organ, by which the firm comes to know its environments, both internal and external. The visual presentation layer of the tool interacts with human thought.

I've been thinking a lot about "mobile BI" -- the ability to view and interact with performance-related information on mobile devices like smartphones and PDAs. Mobile BI is not really very new.

The Web has been constantly evolving. The nature and structure of the Web, as well as the way we use it, have been continuously changing; extending opportunities for the IT community. The Web's evolution had been exerting pressure on IT professionals and executives and businesses.

collaboration = innovation

The primary goals of master data management (MDM) are to promote a shared foundation of common data definitions within your organization, to reduce data inconsistency across the enterprise, and to improve overall return on your IT investment.

OK ... hold on ... what is he talking about now, you ask?

The last two of our seven planning questions deal with the scheduling of the initiative and the means by which it will be accomplished.

Web 3.0 is a deep ocean yet to be fully explored. Like any unknown frontier, Web 3.0 is fraught with technical, business, and social challenges that have yet to be solved. In harnessing opportunities offered by Web 3.0, you might face difficulties and challenges.

A recent New York Times article "Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft" (16 December 2007) talks about the growing perception that Google is set on attacking Microsoft's base with a whole set of Web- and mobile-based software applications.

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.

Managers know that the total of information security risks runs as wide and deep as IT's reach up, down, and across the organization. As IT departments begin the new year with vulnerability assessments to strengthen the overall security posture, managers can approach the issue with a fresh perspective.

I've been saying for years now that I believe that one of the most important developments in business process management (BPM) involves the application of analytics to monitor and analyze the efficiency of distributed business processes.1 Today it is possible to monitor business processes as they execute and to display the findings -- based on calculated key performance indicators