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.

When a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) or enterprise architecture (EA) book hits the shelves, I usually check it out, and when it looks interesting enough, I get a copy. The book Business Rules Management and SOA: A Pattern Language by Ian Graham particularly intrigued me.

collaboration = innovation

A predicate to achieving greater value than just cost reductions from strategic sourcing initiatives is the need for organizations to establish the appropriate partner selection criteria. Although the specific criteria to determine partner suitability in a strategic sourcing context differ from criteria in a cost reduction scenario, the thinking that goes into criteria construction is similar. Because strategic sourcing is poised to grow rapidly, the importance of understanding how organizations can forge a successful sourcing marriage is high today.

Good governance has been a topic of great interest in business in recent years. Recent corporate governance failures and corporate scandals including Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom, which gave rise to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act), are certainly one factor.

Until this title is put in context, it seems like a strange position for anyone to take. It sounds like you are leaving your team holding the bag. Bear with me though.

In 2006, I discussed corporate adoption trends regarding the use of open source BI tools, open source operating systems, and open source databases for data warehousing and BI applications (see my BI Executive Updates "BI for 'Free':Open Source BI Tools Adoption Trends," "Corporate Attitu

Technology budgets are always under attack. Most of these budgets have little or no discretionary room to maneuver. So when the boss says, "What about that Web 2.0 stuff? What are we doing there?" most CIOs and CTOs tell them "We're looking at it," knowing full well that they only have enough money to put out the daily brush fires -- and nothing more.

Focusing on quality forces us to "prioritize" quality ahead of other software attributes (although by doing so we improve those other attributes also). The key to reducing work-in-progress is to limit work going into the work queue; that is, prioritizing projects. In balancing capacity against demand, we need to eliminate wish-based planning that arises from our inability to prioritize features (demands).

A corporation's perception of risk strongly influences its decision making. We have a recent example in the news that illustrates how two different companies have perceived their market risk over time, and their differing approaches to mitigating it.

In the past five Advisors in this series (see sidebar), I have shared with you my experience in dealing with various aspects of delivering a service-oriented architecture (SOA) right. I have presented a number of best practices that practitioners are using effectively in multiple SOA initiatives.

The old saying "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" has ventured beyond the international political stage and into the realm of IT innovation and management. Smart organizations are finding it far more profitable to reach out and collaborate with unfriendly constituencies. Manifestations of this collaborative work strategy are conspicuous in IT security but versions of this can be found increasingly in other management contexts. For this reason, it is a subject worth exploring.

Centralization of security is of increasing urgency as the threat environment continues to expand and as regulatory requirements take hold. A centralized security system is considerably easier to audit than a system where management is spread throughout the enterprise. It is also likely to improve oversight and analysis and to create a more robust environment. Roles and responsibilities are clarified, and maintaining security in interactions with outside organizations such as suppliers and outsourcing vendors is easier.

Over the past few years, many practitioners have addressed the significance of teamwork and collaboration. In fact, every publication that discusses how to deliver the right business value using innovation emphasizes the importance of collaboration.

The XBA model defines what we do. It identifies the core processes we want to manage and establishes boundaries for the company. It's the context by which Xerox works together to collaborate and works independently in harmony: the design and the intent. It's designed to be customer-driven and cross-functional value-based, from outside in.

Although the use of radio frequency identification (RFID)-enabled supply-chain applications has received a fair amount of attention as a possible source of BI, few organizations today are currently integrating RFID data into their data warehouses and BI environments for analysis purposes.

At Smart World 2004, Sunil Gupta of SAP paraphrased Samuel Taylor Coleridge by saying "Data, data everywhere but not a byte to use."