Traditionally, assembly line schedules are centrally developed and controlled. Any change in the schedule must be centrally reconfigured. When the line is small and has few unplanned stoppages, centrally controlled schedules work well.

As a practitioner of agile software development, I've had to participate in and lead collaborative work sessions. People remark on the strong feeling of collaboration during those meetings and the speed at which we get results. Other skilled facilitators manage the same. People ask my colleagues and me how we achieve these effects and whether it can be learned.

Last week, we saw Cognos acquire multidimensional database and performance management analytics vendor Applix, Inc. in an effort to broaden its BI and financial business performance management offerings (see "Keeping Up With the Joneses: Cognos Buys Applix," 11 September 2007).

In my last Advisor (see "Doing a Tap Dance on a Waterbed, Part 1," 30 August 2007), I posed a question that has plagued large systems project managers for a very, very long time: "where do you start your systems requirements -- with the inputs, database, or the outputs?" I suggested that defining the o

I've been thinking recently that the term "self-organizing" has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced. While self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, become confused with anarchy in the minds of many. Why has this occurred?

A client recently solicited my help to run an extensive set of Monte Carlo analyses on their projects. It seemed a compelling prospect at first, but as I examined the opportunity more closely, I instead offered it to a peer, seeing it as definitely more of a numbers-crunching exercise, rather than an examination of overall risks in their program.

I've been thinking recently that the term "self-organizing" has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced. While self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, become confused with anarchy in the minds of many. Why has this occurred? Because there is a contingent within the agile community that is fundamentally anarchist at heart and it has latched onto the term self-organizing because it sounds better than anarchy. However, putting a duck suit on a chicken doesn't make a chicken a duck.

In my last Advisor, "Ten Things an Architect Does to Add Value" (29 August 2007), I provided a list of activities that an architect performs, roughly organized along the lifecycle of creating and applying architecture.

Several Business-IT Strategies Advisors ago (see "Understanding Change in the Context of IT Investment," 6 December 2006), I discussed the concept of change and the need to understand its powerful influences to manage information technology for value effectively. Change is the belle of the IT management ball, which is why within an array of business contexts it frequently attracts our attention.

Organizations seeking total visibility into a sourcing initiative's financial impact will find the task easier if they explore the cost/value equation through the lens of IT asset management (ITAM). The principles of ITAM offer managers a unique perspective into cost and value drivers. Here's how.

In the Cutter IT Journal, "Exploring the Agile Frontier" (Vol. 20, No. 5), I pointed out the importance of coming up with teams that are structured around features (see "Agile Development in the Face of Global Software Projects"). As I explained in that article, these so-called feature teams will have to assemble all roles, knowledge, and skill that are necessary to deliver a complete feature.

Wikipedia described customer relationship management and, indirectly, customer analytics, along these lines:

Active: A centralized database for storing data, which can be used to automate business processes and common tasks.

The latest acquisition to affect the BI/business performance management market is Cognos's announcement that it is buying multidimensional database and performance management analytics vendor Applix, Inc. for approximately US $339 million.

Published after his death, Max Weber's famous essay titled The City first appeared in German in 1921. The essay represented a fundamental look at the history of the occidental city spanning from the establishment of craft guilds to the formation of a political system that involved early aspects of medieval democracy.

Agile software development attempts to enhance our ability to make changes during the product development process. This is valuable because the business world is becoming increasingly chaotic in the following ways:

Customers change their minds or use the product in unanticipated ways.

New competitors appear or existing ones introduce threatening products.

New product technologies arise or planned technologies don't work out as anticipated.

Over the years, I've had the pleasure of working in a range of IT organizations around the world, and I've often worked with, or at least reviewed, many of the enterprise architecture (EA) teams within those organizations. In all cases, the EA team is staffed with some of the best and brightest within IT, all of whom have the organization's best interests at heart.

If you periodically conduct surveys of the users of IT services in your organization, how confident are you that the surveys measure everything in which you might -- or should -- be interested?

Can you remember the last time a technology emerged that had true transformative power? The power to help an organization become something better than it is now because the business is either required to change the way it conducts some work activity or it accelerates a change already underway? In comes software virtualization.

IT has been a critical part of the production of running a business since the early days of the IBM 360. IT supports every aspect of the business from human resources to operations -- yet it has primarily been perceived to be a part of the backstage crew.

When data warehousing and BI appliances (i.e., prepackaged offerings that include software and sometimes hardware designed for data warehousing and BI applications) first appeared on the scene, many initially thought they'd prove most popular as a way for small and mid-sized organizations that lacked a data warehouse to get one up and running quickly.

Recently, I was having lunch with an old friend who is in the first year of a three-plus-year project. I remarked that whenever I see him he is on the way to a meeting or he's just getting out of one.

Want to make change a lot easier on yourself and develop a winning and happy organization at the same time? It might be easier than you think. I'll tell you how.

This summer marked the 5th anniversary of The 'Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Pubic Law No. 107-204, 116 Stat. 745 and codified in different sections of 11, 15, 18, 28, and 29 of the United States Code); aka the 'Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002; aka Sarbanes-Oxley, SarBox, SOX, and a few other unmentionables.

One of the questions I often get is "What does an architect do?" Although there are many day-to-day activities like attending too many meetings, the following list gets to the heart of how architects bring value to their organization.

We read with interest Scott Pollino's response this month (see "In Search of the Strategic 'How'," 1 August 2007) to our previous Advisor, "The Key Strategic Question: How?" (30 May 2007). To review, our Advisor suggested that the important strategic question is "how" the business will actually implement its business strategies.