In enterprise architecture, we're constantly challenged to overcome perceptions that we're in an "ivory tower" or being impractical or even irrelevant. In response, we should be looking for opportunities to provide value within the enterprise. Luckily, we're well suited with skills and well positioned organizationally to do so if we search out the right opportunities.

How many plans are there? Let us count the ways. There are business plans, project plans, program plans, and production plans. There are marketing plans, sales plans, account plans, and vendor plans. There are strategic plans and tactical plans, game plans, travel plans, and vacation plans. There are business budgets and personal budgets and forecasts.

Significant business processes are being outsourced to other companies, but most organizations do not check to confirm if those companies have documented emergency preparedness and disaster recovery plans in place.

In my previous Advisor in this series (see " Is a Prospective and Promising Passage to India Possible?

Too often we find business organizations (and IT organizations) with strategic plans that are vague and unhelpful. These plans feature high-level strategy statements exemplified by the following: our company strategy is to provide the best-quality and lowest-cost financial services to our customers. Often the company strategy statement is then further developed with bulleted statements such as:

Service improvement: attract, retain, and provide high-quality service to our financial service customers

The results from a Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in March 2007) of 119 end-user organizations (based worldwide) and their data warehousing, BI, and other analysis practices, indicates that end-user organizations are continuing to use data warehousing and BI to analyze supply chain data.

I recently read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I had read pieces of his earlier book, The Tipping Point , and I also heard him on C-SPAN talking about his new book.

The cover story of the 11 June 2007 issue of Business Week, "3M's Innovation Crisis: How Six Sigma Almost Smothered Its Idea Culture," discusses the great difficulty companies and CEOs have in trying to balance "innovation and efficiency." "While process excellence demands precision

I know that none of you really want to be here, so I'll try to keep this as short as possible. We shouldn't be more than two ... two-and-a-half hours ... getting through this risk stuff, and if we all just push through, it shouldn't be too painful.

The cover story of the 11 June 2007 issue of Business Week, "3M's Innovation Crisis: How Six Sigma Almost Smothered Its Idea Culture," discusses the great difficulty companies and CEOs have in trying to balance "innovation and efficiency." "While process excellence demands precision, consistency, and repetition, innovation calls for variation, failure, and serendipity," the article states.

Two years ago, Sun and its partners introduced the Java Business Integration (JBI) environment (working through the Java Community Process -- or JCP).

Managers can't wait until the IT organization finally disappears. Not that it will go out of existence-- although some managers would be fine with that -- but that organizationally IT will find itself so woven into the fabric of everyday work that it will cease to operate as a clearly defined structure with its own office door upon which a sign hangs, "IT Department: Enter at Your Own Risk."

Application outsourcing is becoming an increasingly common strategy for handling everything from an individual legacy application through end-to-end support of an entire portfolio. Companies turn to outsourcing to cut costs, focus on core competencies, gain guaranteed service performance, free resources, offload undesirable tasks, and/or take advantage of specific expertise offered by the outsourcer.

Eric Clemons was moved to respond at some length to David Lineman's Advisor of 30 May (see "Securing the Long Tail"). Due to the length of his response, we are providing a link to the article rather than sending it out in an e-mail message.

One of the most enduring results of research in information systems has been the degree of discomfort that business executives claim when it comes to making decisions about IS and IT. The great number of acronyms (increasing daily it seems), the pervasiveness of technical language, and the unique blend of skills that are required to understand computing can be very intimidating.

The next time you find yourself struggling to get plans or funding approved to better secure your organization's customer information systems, be sure to point out that data breaches are costly in more ways than one. For real-world proof, you need look no further than the ongoing saga at TJX Companies, Inc.

Back in the 1980s, I taught distributed database design. At that time, there was a lot of interest but there weren't a lot of applications. Moreover, with some real exceptions, the technology wasn't quite ready for prime time. Today, when there is a lot of real need and real technology, the distributed database has fallen out of favor.

The first principle of agile software development states, "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software." Since 2001 when that principle was first established, its meaning has been revised by some in the agile community to mean that projects should deliver business value. That's a laudable goal, and one I personally believe in. Furthermore, I believe that the success of a project should be based on business value delivered. But in order to gauge success, you have to be able to quantify the measure.

It used to be that the Internet was a one-way street. Sites sent information to you at the desktop but you didn't send any back because there was little reason to, unless it was an e-mail to complain. Today's Internet is a more collaborative, interactive enterprise. Social networking sites, Google, eBay, and MySpace establish a kind of partnership in which the user provides content as much as consumes it. Hiding in this evolving collaborative Web are the seeds of a new generation of information security risks.

One of the challenges we perpetually face is how to explain the value of a more deliberate, enterprise-wide, and architectural approach to IT.

Over the past few years, I have noticed a trend of streamlining IT spending. In general, it all depends on the implications that IT may have in achieving the strategic business goals of a company. However, as service-oriented architecture (SOA) becomes a popular buzzword, IT practitioners are forced to recognize the significance of the role business organizations play in their world.

As organizations continue to build IT project management competencies, they have begun to realize the need for a cadre of global IT managers who can manage offshore and outsourced IT projects. A global IT manager needs the following key traits:1

It's happened again: a critical project has gone off track and needs to be turned around before business results are affected and careers, including yours, are wrecked. You know you need to act quickly to prevent failure, but what, exactly should you do? After all, before the project "went red," it was sincerely believed that effective action was already being taken. So what, exactly, should the project team do differently now?

In this Advisor, I'll address the million-dollar question: how do you get a team to develop a clear and elevating goal?

Although companies continue to express considerable interest in using neural networks and other advanced statistical modeling techniques for data mining and other BI applications, most organizations' BI and analytic practices rely primarily on standard reporting and multidimensional (OLAP) analysis methods.