Two months ago, we began this three-part series on our just-completed Cutter survey on IT budget and costing practices (see "IT Budgeting/Costing Is a Mess -- and Hinders IT Governance, Part 1," 26 September 2007 and "IT Budgeting/Costing Is a Mess -- and Hinders IT Goverance, Part 2," 7 November 2007; for more on Cutter's survey, see the Cutter Benchmark Review, August 2007).

I believe that there are some very basic things that systems engineers should learn. In the first installment of this Advisor series (see "Undergraduate Basics for Systems Engineering, Part 1: Principles," 3 October 2007), I discussed the first of these fundamental lessons: principles (heuristics, laws).

There are hundreds of books and a countless number of articles on the nature of corporate or organizational culture. However, there is general agreement that corporate culture is about "how things happen in this organization" and the underlying shared views about what are acceptable ways of behaving, feeling, thinking, and communicating.

I've been saying for years that companies should consider data warehousing and BI as strategic applications as opposed to some sort of supplemental capabilities to be "bolted on" to enterprise applications as an afterthought.

I certainly got people's attention when I raised the question of "open" versus "closed" architectures (see "Steve Jobs: Architecture, Platforms, and the Big Picture," 25 October 2007, and "Steve Jobs: Architecture, Platforms, and the Big Picture, Part 2," 8 November 2007).

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 late October, IBM released the findings of an interesting survey it conducted in the spring and summer of 2007 of over 1,200 chief financial officers (CFOs) from 79 countries.

Business process management (BPM) is a concept that has been alive in the IT world for many years under the guise of various names and labels. In the client-server era of the 1990s, BPM tools were called workflow management systems.

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).

In the last Advisor (see "Current Offshoring Challenges," 21 November 2007), Phil Zweig examined the results of Cutter's recent survey on offshoring, which found that turnover in offshore staff was identified as a challenge by 30% of the respondents [1]. In his article, Phil makes many good observations about the severity of this issue and why we'd expect it to cause problems for clients.

A friend recently told me that while he understands the principles of agile logically, he is unable to explain it to others. So he asked me to come up with a nontechnical/business metaphor to help him better understand what agile really means. After some thinking, I asked if he remembered playing the game of "gossip" around a campfire as a kid.

As business architecture initiatives continue to take hold, executives are seeking to clarify the role of the business architect. It is important to understand the diversity of roles within core and virtual business architecture teams. Defining these roles will help ensure the successful deployment of business architecture initiatives.

A reader contacted me last week to discuss the concept of business activity monitoring (BAM). This Advisor is based on our conversation.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is an alternative worth considering for companies that face the high costs of enterprise-wide implementations and extensive reengineering efforts to enhance existing business processes. In particular, small companies often do not have the financial resources to purchase "on-premise" systems that require significant investment in packaged software and dedicated hardware. However, it is also true that large companies with extensive installations are beginning to consider SaaS as a cost-cutting measure.

collaboration = innovation

Trying to persuade a skeptical audience to believe a new message is an uphill battle. When Agile software development methodologies emerged in the mid-to-late-1990s, it wouldn't take much to know there was a problem in the industry that needed to be solved. But most were skeptical that Agile methods were the answer.

One of the main areas of development in EA and SOA this year has been in governance. Pundits describe the value and importance of governance, while vendors hawk solutions, as if governance were something we could actually buy. Lately, I've seen articles and presentations that espouse "Governance from Day One." This is one area where I disagree.

This month, we come to the next of the seven planning questions: How much?

It is good to have a standard way of doing the things we do often. My wife has a way of dealing with the laundry as it goes from hamper to washer to dryer to drawers. I have my own system for making sure the dishwasher is as packed as possible while still making sure the items come out clean. We each have our own distinct way of getting the kids ready for school in the morning, and it is best to let one person take the reins if we are both around.

Today, we have new knowledge about software measurement. Because it's an emerging discipline, we know more about it today than ever before. The emergence of the Internet and Web-based development has had significant impact. During the Y2K transition, additional patterns arose. A major economic downturn, agile methods, and application development and management outsourcing brought other dynamics.

Approximately half of the organizations currently using on-demand BI and on-demand data warehousing solutions have integrated them with their enterprise applications and other operational systems.

First, the bad news: a month or two ago, I was talking to one of my good friends, who also happens to be one of the world's great students of software productivity. I asked him why it was that there was very little discussion in the press about software productivity. His response was that, from his data, there hadn't been very much improvement over the last decade or so.

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.

Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa. Easter, Independence Day, Halloween. Pick the event; it comes but once a year. For each of these events, you can anticipate certain activities and behaviors. You can anticipate certain risks. Surprisingly enough, we seem surprised as similar risks happen to us year after year.

As business architecture initiatives continue to take hold, executives are seeking to clarify the role of the business architect. It is important to understand the diversity of roles within core and virtual business architecture teams. Defining these roles will help ensure the successful deployment of business architecture initiatives.