In my last Advisor ("Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 8: Keys for Creating Designer Norms in Teams," 1 March 2007), I told you about how to make and keep operating agreements that develop into a set of custom-designed norms and support a team in achieving high performance.

The recent switchover to Daylight Savings Time in the US was a challenge for those who live in the States, but in many ways, it was even more of a headache for our allies overseas. Those of us who deal with enterprises outside the US have the unpleasant challenge of trying to figure out what time it is where.

The most significant component of sourcing is people, or the workforce, and organizations are moving toward a more global workforce to reap the benefits of sourcing. Obviously, the question that arises next is: how do we assemble our global workforce? More importantly, how much does the cultural diversity of our workforce matter?

Last fall, I discussed some of the main ideas underlying the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts (see "Enterprise 2.0: Hip or Hype?" 25 October 2006, and "Beyond the Hype: Enterprise 2.0 Considerations," 22 November 2006).

collaboration = innovation

A best practice is to prevent a privacy incident from occurring in the first place. Do this by first identifying current privacy exposures and second by prioritizing how to address them. However, when a privacy incident occurs, resolve the issues as quickly as possible by following your established incident response procedures and then analyzing the incident.

Wikipedia describes master data management (MDM) as follows:

My initial analysis of the results of a Cutter Consortium BI and data warehousing survey conducted this month (March 2007) of 119 end-user organizations (based worldwide) indicates that the use of real-time (or near-real time) data warehouse updating practices is increasing.

Publications like Business 2.0, Fast Company, and even Business Week are all writing about Web 2.0 -- the new net and the next digital gold rush. What the hell is going on now? Is this another bubble? Will Web 2.0 companies crash and burn like their parents?

In previous Advisors (see "A Recipe for Success," 8 February 2007, "A Recipe for Success, Part 2," 15 February 2007, and "A Recipe for Success, Part 3," 8 March 2007), I introduced

Are organizations fully capable of understanding the possible risks to value creation from technology investment in the absence of an economic value analysis of that technology? Wal-Mart's tale of RFID tag deployment is illuminating.

A new world order has been evolving since around 1990 or so, and we in the IT industry have responded to it with such efforts, fads, buzzwords, and new technologies as reengineering, the Internet, outsourcing, optimization, virtualization, and many others. However, we really have not seen the changes enabled by these new technologies and evolving global business needs holistically -- as a call for new ways of doing business -- and we certainly have not rallied ourselves as a profession to rethink the way we extract value from technology in our businesses.

If you follow astrology, you know that Gemini is the sign of the twins. And it's often said that Gemini have two sides: their good side and the other side -- the evil twin, which emerges at unexpected times, with undesirable results. I don't know if this is generally true about Gemini, but it is often true about other complex things.

We continue to confront a basic problem in IT management: business managers aren't much interested in participating in prioritization, alignment, and planning exercises for IT. This is particularly true for business-unit managers who are components of a multi-line-of-business corporation. While the corporate CFO, and possibly the CEO, do worry about IT costs, individual business unit managers who consume IT services simply aren't interested.

No doubt, like many other practitioners, you have indoctrinated yourself with the mantra that transformation and innovation are the two true key cornerstones of your success. You may have recognized that it is not enough for your company simply to be efficient in order to stay ahead of your competitors.

Imagine sitting in the park on a nice summer day, and a flock of birds sweeps the sky. One moment they are circling, another they dart to the left or drop to the ground. Each move is so beautiful that it appears choreographed. Furthermore, the movements of the flock seem smoother than those of any one bird in the flock. Yet, the flock has no high-level controller or even a lead bird.

Oracle's recent acquisition of analytic database and enterprise performance management (EPM) vendor Hyperion Software continues a trend in which the large, enterprise software vendors are aggressively moving to increase their presence in the market for BI tools and performance management applications.

A friend of mine is a computer science professor. Periodically, he assigns his first-year students the job of writing a sort routine. If they try to write an original sort routine, he gives them a lower grade.

In my last two Advisors (see "A Recipe for Success," 8 February 2007 and "A Recipe for Success, Part 2," 15 February 2007), I introduced David Anderson's recipe for success: focus on quality,

"We have extraordinarily low risk premiums now; risk is no longer perceived as major risk, at least as it was in years past, and that, I must say, I find disturbing," former US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said at a conference last week, in which he also said there was a possibility of a US recession before the end of 2007 [1].

Sourcing maturity has naturally led organizations to investigate the legitimacy of forging initiatives with a more strategic flavor. The next wave of sourcing -- mostly offshoring, but outsourcing too -- is likely to reveal attempts by some ambitious organizations to derive much more strategic sourcing value than those sometimes-elusive cost reductions. It is worth understanding what strategic sourcing might include and the management thinking applied to ensure their success.

Recently, a colleague asked me about my understanding of the reference architecture models for software-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives. In particular, her question was related to how these architecture models stack up with other frameworks like information service bus (commercially known as enterprise service bus, or ESB).

Traditional project management techniques reveal their limitations when an organization is faced with achieving some business objective in which a number of IT projects require execution to realize that goal. Because the projects share a common objective of driving attainment of the objective, they require a unique management approach not found in traditional project management. The term of art for this enhanced way of managing is called a program management office (PMO).

Becoming the preferred provider of IT services for your company doesn't mean you no longer need or want to outsource. A portfolio of qualified vendors with whom you have a business relationship based on trust, commitment, communication, champion, and culture can provide many business benefits [2].

The number of laws and regulations that govern how personal information must be handled continues to grow worldwide. Organizations, and the personnel handling the information, must understand and comply with the requirements and laws for all the locations in which personally identifiable information (PII) is handled.