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.

So where does the distinction between corporate and consumer technology begin and end? Here's a clue: it doesn't. If I had asked the same question in the 1980s, it would have been considered stupid, since there was absolutely no relationship between corporate and consumer technology. But now everything is different and there is absolutely no difference between the two.

A couple of years ago, someone asked me about the history of the agile software movement and about the historical influences on my approach to agile. This Advisor is my update of my response to that inquiry.

As I wrote last week (see "New Changes in Governance and Compliance, Part 1," 31 May 2007), the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) have approved changes to SOX Section 404 to try to help alleviate the costs of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, which is still about 30 times more

Enterprise architecture is hard, no doubt. Anyone who has undertaken an EA effort can share stories of the many challenges they've faced.

Certainly, a familiar challenge is lack of buy-in. This may be encountered within the business and/or IT communities as disinterest, apathy, or even outright resistance. Why does this happen?

This series of Advisors is targeted at readers whose organizations have a reasonably successful project management office (PMO) in place and are looking for ways to enhance the value they receive from their project office; i.e., to answer the question, "where do we go from here?" Last month (see "Winning Project Office Tec

One dimension of sourcing not often discussed is control. How much of it across all business activities have organizations exerted historically and how much of it are they willing to cede to ensure sourcing success? Companies willing to explore their control quotient will gain a self-awareness of their temperment for sourcing. This is a constructive first step in executing an ambitious sourcing program.

Innovation: Introduction of new things or methods

Invention: A creation (a new device or process) resulting from study and experimentation

Intuition: The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes

The Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Sloan School of Management conducted a survey of 456 enterprises between 1995 and 2006, which identified four stages of enterprise architecture (EA) maturity as follows:

Stage 1: Business silos

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 the use of open source BI by end-user organizations continues to grow.

I spent last weekend in Florida, but it wasn't my idea. I've been working in Florida for the last few weeks and commuting home to Kansas every Friday. I normally take a 4:50 flight that gets me home about 9:00 pm. Last week, the plane was a little late coming in but we were out on the runway about 30 minutes later, so I still had slim hopes of making my connection.

So far in this series of Advisors (see "More in this series"), I've focused on the basics of building a team. There's plenty more to say there, but let's look at a different topic for the next few months. Let's look at collaborating across boundaries, or what is frequently called partnering.

It has been a busy time on the governance and compliance home front over the past few weeks, with several items of interest being reported. We start first with the results of the Financial Executives International (FEI) sixth SOX compliance survey of some 200 companies that had average revenues of US $6.8 billion.

It has been said many times that service-oriented architecture (SOA) is not something you buy, but is rather an architectural approach to building applications by combining services together. A Google search for "can't buy SOA" and its variations yields about 50 articles from the past two years elaborating on this point.

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 purpose of this fourth building block is to envision and detail the desirable outsourcing arrangement and how it will be operationalized. The Design building block results in detailed documents that articulate the future arrangement and is used as the basis for supplier bids.

In the April 2007 issue of Cutter IT Journal (Vol. 20, No. 4), the authors did an excellent job of describing the new opportunities and challenges presented to organizations doing business in "the long tail." One aspect that deserves some additional attention is how customer data is protected in the tail.