Successful offshore initiatives rely heavily on the initiative teams and executives involved. A common topic of discussion surrounding these efforts is the culture of offshore vendors and how cultural differences affect collaboration in a global work environment.

We hear a lot these days about the need for aligning IT and business objectives. Certainly this is an issue, and the frustrations that both IT and their business organizations feel are well documented. However, I would assert that the root cause is that we've allowed IT to have its own objectives in the first place.

Let's put it a different way. Does the logistics organization in your company have any of the following objectives?

The first step in getting smart about outsourcing is to gather insight. The goal of this appraisal is to gather intelligence from those who have preceded your organization and to determine the potential implications for you. It is wise to cast your net wide across diverse sources when gathering knowledge.

Last month, I wrote that Oracle Corporation sucked the air out of the other BI vendors' lungs when it announced it would buy business performance management/OLAP database vendor Hyperion Solutions (see "Upping the Ante, Oracle Buys Hyperion," 6 March 2007).

Last week, IBM announced that it would attempt to collect the very minimum personal information from its online customers in the name of privacy. This rang a bell with me. A while back, I was involved in a privacy, confidentiality, and security committee manned by industry and government folks.

A long time ago in a world far away, a flame-breathing dragon was troubling a kingdom. Periodically the dragon would swoop down from the sky and ravage the village, burning homes and eating the livestock. When the problem finally came to the king's attention, he called upon one of his brave knights, saying, "Go and slay the dragon in the western hills.

The crash happened suddenly. The other car appeared as a brief blur in my windshield. In an instant, the airbag deployed, ruptured, and surrounded me in white dust. My vehicle and I came to an abrupt and violent halt.

Software AG's announcement that it is acquiring business process management suite (BPMS) vendor webMethods for approximately US $546 million is an important development for the BPM market. First, it signals that the latest round of consolidation continues (one could point to IBM's acquisition of FileNet last fall as the start of this latest round).

We recently completed a workshop about strategic IT planning. The participants raised three key questions:

What exactly is a strategic IT plan?

Why should the business pay for a strategic IT plan?

What are the barriers to doing a successful strategic IT plan?

There are no hard-and-fast rules about what should and should not be outsourced. Certainly, industry and academia are most comfortable with the outsourcing of activities that have mature markets, predictable demand, predictable costs, and well-known performance standards.

India is a nation with rich tradition, history, and heritage, and many industrious and highly educated people. The country has been the center of one of the oldest and most ancient civilizations known to mankind and has been in the forefront of many scientific innovations and inventions since the early days of the industrial revolution.

To be successful, architecture development efforts should be approached as an executive-sponsored, well-funded project with dedicated business and technology staff -- what's new? A frequent justification for the undertaking is the requirement for a new business-driven IT strategic plan, often the result of disenchantment with previous IS-driven IT strategic planning efforts.

Several weeks ago I wrote that findings from a recent Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in March 2007) of 119 end-user organizations (based worldwide) and their data warehousing and BI practices indicated that few organizations today express a high level of satisfaction with the quality and integrity of their customer data (see "For Most, The Qual

Last month's Advisor (see "Intelligent Data," 29 March 2007) dealt with the idea of creating intelligent data as a means of improving data connections across the Internet.

I recently did some consulting work for a small company; one that has had many project successes but a couple of significant, if not outright, failures, then nonoptimal outcomes, to say the least. In talking through the problem projects with the staff, it seems like deja vu all over again.

In this first of a two-part analysis, I examine the simple first steps that individuals and organizations can take to implement Monte Carlo analyses effectively without creating a huge administrative overburden.

Any company that's been in business for long has acquired a bunch of existing, important, but aging applications or systems. These may be older COBOL or mainframe applications, or systems built using proprietary products, CASE tools, or obsolete languages.

Recently, one of my close friends (currently working as a CTO for a Fortune 100 company) was interviewing for a senior-level IT executive position. During one of her face-to-face interviews, she was asked opinion of the role of IT in enabling business. Specifically, what role she thinks the architect plays in defining the business strategy.

This series of Advisors uses the first phase of the outsourcing lifecycle, the architect phase, to highlight techniques (the building blocks) clients can use to design the relationship they desire. Thus, the relationship will be one that has been carefully planned and calculated, not an inadvertent consequence.

In business today, we are hammered with more information than ever, and we are still expected to get more done in less time. Usually, this increases the pressure to juggle a number of tasks simultaneously, in a frail attempt to meet expectations. We are busier than ever, and the situation will likely get worse.

The Internet changes everything! This was the rally cry of dot-comers, venture capitalists, and back-of-the-napkin business plan peddlers during the late 1990s. And the learning industry was not immune!

Data warehousing and BI practitioners have been harping for years about how important it is for companies to ensure the quality and integrity of their customer data.

The late author and media commentator Marshall McCluen famously said, "The map is not the territory." If he were alive today, he might be saying, "The satellite photograph (or Google Maps/Earth) is not the territory!" But if you put these together, you are getting pretty close to being the virtual reality of the territory.

A lot of Cutter Advisor articles serve as a kind of mental note for people who are deeply emerged in some sort of IT-related activities -- be it software development projects or an implementation of some new IT governance processes.

In late March, the public learned that hackers stole credit card information from approximately 45 million cardholder customers of TJX, the parent company of retailers such as TJ Maxx and Marshalls (see "Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More," 1 February 2007, by Cutter Fellow and ERM&G Practice Director Robert N. Charette). Never have shoppers in search of bargains anticipated bargaining for so much -- great prices and theft of personal information.