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.

In the rush of sourcing issues that threaten to pull you under like a riptide, it is worthwhile sometimes to step back and recalibrate your perspective to better understand the current sourcing environment as a necessary step in planning for the future. This might represent an ideal time for this. We're just weeks away from the end of summer -- and after Labor Day, the starting gun goes off for those remaining projects in the planning queue before the end of the fiscal year.

The release of software under an open source license has two key business implications: (1) the possibility of reduced cost and increased value for software users and (2) the potential emergence of peer production networks.

Over the past few years, it seems more disasters and emergencies have impacted businesses around the world than in any other time in history. Natural disasters, terrorist activities, and criminal actions are affecting organizations of all sizes. Organizations should know that they must be prepared to address a wide range of emergencies and disasters to keep their business going.

Back in January, I discussed Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) entry into the data warehousing and BI market with its new Neoview offering that combines data warehouse software, hardware, and services (see "Hewlett-Packard's Data Warehousing Gamble," 23 January 2007).

People never notice the most important things in an advanced society until those things stop working or they disappear. This is true of electricity or water or other forms of infrastructure, like roads and bridges. We count on these things for transportation and recreation and commerce, but it is only when they're gone that we begin to understand their value.

A recent Cutter Consortium survey indicates that project duration was 35% shorter on successful Agile projects (19 weeks) than on challenged Agile projects (29 weeks) (see Question 1). Does this finding play into the hands of the "Agile doesn't scale to large projects" crowd?

The increasing attention being garnered by the Web 2.0 phenomenon is reminiscent of the buzz and excitement of the dot-com days. In December 1999, Time Magazine named dot-com pioneer Jeff Bezos the Person of the Year. In December 2006, the magazine put "you" on the cover. The picture was the console of the YouTube player with a mirror instead of the screen.

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series of Advisors (see "Winning Project Office Techniques, Part 1," 2 May 2007, and "Winning Project Office Techniques, Part 2," 6 June 2007), I discussed a couple of advanced project office techniques that not everyone considers bu

Apparently, former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Like many popular quotes, it is not clear whether he actually said this, but it is interesting to run into a situation where the expressed wisdom holds true.