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."

Two years ago when I wrote an Advisor about Woehlke's Law: nothing gets done till nothing gets done (see "Woehlke's Law: Nothing Gets Done Till Nothing Gets Done," 21 July 2005), it never really occurred to me that there actually was a Richard Woehlke alive and well and living in New England or that one day he'd cho

"Any publicity is good publicity" is an old adage that US Airways has recently had an opportunity to put to a test. In mid-February, an ice storm on the US eastern seaboard grounded the airline, leaving tens of thousands of passengers stranded and creating mountains of lost luggage at US Airways hubs, especially Philadelphia.

One of my clients is building a new stock market Web site. The site is primarily centered on the display of information. Like many projects, the company is in a rush and doesn't want to spend a lot of money. We evaluated several different approaches and finally settled on Ruby on Rails.

This week we noticed an article in Federal Computer Week (12 March 2007, pp. 62-63) that describes how US federal agency computer projects can be on several "watch" lists. The article notes that the "Office of Management and Budget lists 246 business cases ... on its ... Watch List."

To better understand what factors actually play a role in the sourcing decision offshore, I have discussed this issue in interviews with over 60 representatives of client firms in the US as well as IT services vendor firms and captive units in India, Russia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, and Armenia. From the data I collected, two decision criteria emerged as critical in making the sourcing choice:

If you are reading this, you probably manage an organization of people. How well do you manage? Would you like to have a simple, quantified measure of manager effectiveness? I think I may have discovered one, so read on.

I recently had a conversation with a colleague named Rob. Rob and I used to work together in another organization -- call it Office C. Rob left Office C several months ago, as did I a couple of weeks ago.

Let's start by examining the mission (or purpose) of information technology by asking, "What is the business purpose of the IT department in your company?" Can you answer this question? Is your answer similar to the answers of the CEO and CFO?

According to findings from a recent Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in March 2007) of 119 end-user organizations based worldwide that I've been analyzing, many organizations are now facing the need to consolidate disparate data marts and data warehouses.

In the dark, dim days when I was a child, people used mostly black telephones connected to the wall by a wire. They placed calls using a rotary dial. Then came colored phones with push buttons, wireless phones, cellular phones, and VoIP. All of this seemed to happen in the blink of an eye, but it has been at least 30 years. And there's a lot more to come.