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.

While it is obvious that firms exist to serve customers, it is not so obvious why business and IT strategy often does not start nor end with the customer. Over and over, I have worked with organizations that, while they genuflect before the customer altar, show up in church only once a year.

In a recent Cutter survey on offshoring, turnover in offshore staff was identified as a challenge by 30% of the respondents [1]. And, indeed, it is a subject that has received considerable attention in the press over the last year. According to an article in Information Age earlier this year, among the challenges that offshore service companies in India face is "staff turnover averaging at 15-20% annually in software development and at anything between 30% to 140% in business process outsourcing" [2].

In the entirety of a project, there is one second that is often the determining factor. That is the second between an observation and a reaction.1

To multisource or not to multisource? This is a question that will grow in importance as the size of sourcing and the varieties of processes sourced marches upward. In true, two-handed fashion -- on the one hand, on the other hand -- let's consider multisourcing's value first, then some of its risks.

IBM's latest announcement that it plans to buy BI vendor Cognos, Inc. for approximately US $5 billion continues efforts by the major enterprise players to bolster their positions in the lucrative market for BI and analytics through strategic acquisitions.

One of the strengths of the US economy is the diversification of industries along with free markets that function well enough, if not always at 100% efficiency. The variety of products produced, ranging from branded consumer goods to energy resources, is truly impressive. Often Americans take for granted the scope of the US economy.

collaboration = innovation

Software development is about building abstractions, right? We try to understand the customers and build abstract domain models out of their concepts and ideas; out of that we build new abstractions named code, an abstract virtual machine interprets this code, and during the interpretation it uses another abstraction -- the database schema -- to store the information, and so on.

As I head off to the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, California, USA, this week, I can't seem to stop thinking about what Oracle's proposed acquisition of middleware maker BEA Systems, Inc. would mean for Oracle, end-user organizations, and the market in general. It appears that I'm not the only one, as the topic is definitely on other attendees' minds, too.

Not long ago, the Wall Street Journal announced that joining management by objective and total quality management as approaches that have marched in the management discipline hit parade is a new methodology called management by data (see "Now, It's Business By Data, but Numbers Still Can't Tell Future," by Scott Thurm).

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).

The data steward role is not a business role in the "take customer orders" or "prepare invoices" sense. It is clearly a role that bleeds over into what was traditionally the IT space. IT and business must come together, and the data steward is one of many roles that will help accomplish that.

The majority of organizations using on-demand BI and data warehousing solutions and services maintain copies on-site of the data generated or used by their on-demand software.

In my last Advisor (see "Steve Jobs: Architecture, Platforms, and the Big Picture," 25 October 2007), I talked about Steve Jobs and "closed architectures." A number of things have transpired in just two weeks. The first is Apple's announcement of its developer environment for the iPhone.

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.

To create an effective enterprise risk management process -- one where risks are going to be managed as a system -- you need to have both your enterprise management of risk strategy and your risk management processes in alignment.