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

As IT organizations march into 2008, cost containment and reductions will once again appear at the top of managers' dance cards. Managing costs might prove a priority even more acute than usual if economists' predictions come true and we fall into a recession next year.

For most businesses, buying the items needed to run the business is simple: order the item, pick it up or have it delivered, perhaps inspect it, pay for it, and it belongs to the business. Whether the item is a box of paper clips or a supertanker, the process is essentially the same.

One point on which virtually all project management gurus agree is the need for every project to have a charter. A good project charter spells out the project's goals and objectives, as well as the resources that are devoted to achieve them. Most importantly, though, the charter outlines the way that work will proceed and empowers the project team to deliver results.

From 2000 to 2002, there was an intriguing and active debate about the relative merits of Extreme Programming (XP and its agile ilk) and the approaches advocated by the process movement, particularly the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Today that debate has gone largely silent. It's not that the issue is less interesting than it was.

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.

Some organizations are literally turning themselves inside out and outside in as a means of adapting to new ways of doing business brought about by technology. As 2008 looms, this trend should accelerate as more organizations see the potential in the application of these clever arrangements.

What do I mean by inside out and outside in? Let's explore each.

collaboration = innovation

Our ears hear an orchestra make noises, and our intellects conceive the patterns that make those noises into music; our eyes and ears see and hear human movement and speech, and our histrionic sensibility conceives the patterns that make them into action.

One of the most innovative practices of agile development is a contribution from extreme programming: test-driven development (TDD). Briefly, TDD is the art of building a software system along a growing set of automated developer tests, usually unit tests. This is comprised of a disciplined series of tiny steps to add new functionality:

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 meta-models, but it is important for an architect to understand that architecture is founded on architecture of its own.