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.

Unlike many overhyped technology fads, which are driven by vendor innovations rather than genuine customer needs, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) movement is rapidly expanding because the growing array of on-demand applications truly addresses longstanding shortcomings in traditional on-premise applications.

Business Objects has shaken up the text mining and analysis market by announcing it is acquiring unstructured data analysis vendor Inxight Software. This deal will allow Business Objects to add text mining and analysis capabilities to its BI tools and applications lineup.

Auto-ID technology began in 1999 with the formation of a consortium that sponsored research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. After several years of development and testing, MIT licensed Auto-ID technology to GS1, the nonprofit standards organization responsible for the implementation of bar code standards during the 1970s.

In large, traditionally managed organizations, a transition to agile could seem a daunting cultural shock. Management in such organizations is governed by policies that are based on deep-rooted paradigms from plan-driven approaches with a command-and-control-based structure. These organizations by nature have become so rigid in their management style, that agility seems to them an impossible dream.

The Advisor you are reading here is published within Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) & Governance Advisory Service. The ERM taxonomy represents more than just slick terminology to attract readers. It speaks to evolving wisdom about how risks should be managed today and how organizations are responding to this new thinking.

The past year or so has been a happy time for software as a service (SaaS) proponents, with Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and others loudly singing the benefits of the on-demand model for CRM, sales force automation (SFA), and even ERP applications.

The term "innovation" has become quite fashionable these days. Every company or organization aspiring to gain or hold some meaningful position in the market is forced to "be innovative" -- if it is not, it is out. As with any term that is mainly a tool for marketing campaigns, the meaning of "innovation" has evolved during the last few years and become very ambiguous.

I believe that it is essential to benchmark the performance of offshore vendors periodically to maintain a healthy relationship all around [1]. So in this Advisor, I would like to communicate about this aspect of managing sourcing relationships: using a set of metrics.

Business performance management, corporate performance management (CPM), enterprise performance management (EPM), and the real-time enterprise (RTE) are catchy terms used by vendors and consultancies to promote their different offerings.