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.

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.