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.

This series of Advisors has been looking at using schedules to modularly construct contracts; you only use the schedules you need in any given circumstance. This approach also allows for third parties that may need to sign the schedules to have only the information they require.

Debate continues regarding the pros and cons of offshoring IT services -- such as software and Web development, technical and customer support services, data analysis, customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence (BI) activities -- and other business processes to countries like India, China, Brazil, the Philippines, and Ireland.

Reading job postings for senior security executives, you will certainly be exposed to a monotonous, almost boilerplate recitation of the requisite skills, experiences, and education sought by the hiring company. Less often will the job spec require the applicant to document the information security value delivered to the current organization for which he or she currently works. Why is this?

The number of data warehousing and BI appliances -- prepackaged offerings that include software (and sometimes hardware) designed for data warehousing and BI applications -- on the market continues to grow. The latest entry into this hot market is the Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance from open source information management specialist Ingres Corporation.

The Wall Street Journal recently published "Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You" (30 July 2007), listing some methods you might use to get around your CIO's policies and procedures; things like how to download forbidden software or get your e-mail from other places when your corporate messaging server

"We value people more than tools and processes" is one of the statements of the Agile Manifesto. Does this mean agilists don't use tools? Certainly not!

The most interesting development to affect the business process market recently is business process management (BPM) suite vendor Metastorm's announcement that it has acquired Proforma Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise architecture (EA) and business process analysis (BPA) modeling tools. (Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.)

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.

Early in my career, I managed projects at Prodigy -- the IBM/Sears/CBS partnership, which paved the way for online information, shopping, and services. Among the many challenges we faced was the need to develop effective tools for developing and managing content. At the time I arrived, a great gap had emerged between the expectations of the prospective users of the content system and its developers.

We have been working with clients on establishing the project management office (PMO) function and pointing the PMO in the right direction. We have also been making presentations at conferences and at companies on this subject. Two questions often are asked: is the PMO important to achieving business value with projects, and what exactly is the charter for the PMO? Our answers are simple: the PMO is on the front lines of business value, and it plays a critical role in its achievement.

A reader called last week to chat about important trends and developments affecting the application of BI. This week's Advisor is based on our discussion.

I see a number of important trends that are helping to influence organizations' BI and data warehousing efforts, or which are indicative of where they are focusing their activities. These include the following:

Perhaps one of the most promising areas for application of the EPCglobal Network and RFID technology involves service parts inventory management.

The emergence of agile techniques fundamentally shook the world of software development. They allowed software teams to systematically harness self-organization and embrace change, to incorporate feedback throughout development, and to seize opportunities that would otherwise go missed. While this is truly a stark and welcomed contrast to the static predict-and-control methods of a waterfall approach, it also stands in contrast to the organizational leadership, management, and governance structures of modern day.

Reading job postings for senior security executives, you will certainly be exposed to a monotonous, almost boilerplate recitation of the requisite skills, experiences, and education sought by the hiring company. Less often will the job spec require the applicant to document the information security value delivered to the current organization for which he or she currently works. Why is this?

Two years ago, in an Advisor titled "Update on Eclipse" (4 May 2005), I wrote about the advances in the Eclipse framework accelerated by the spin-off of Eclipse into the independent, open source, Eclipse Foundation.

In the course of my career, I have written, or managed the development of, hundreds of plans -- business plans, program plans, project plans, test plans, strategic plans, tactical plans, and more. I have developed plans that comprised two pages, 20 pages, and 200 pages.