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.

You may have heard a big gasp the other day. That was the sound of Oracle Corporation sucking the air out of the other BI vendors' lungs with the announcement that it plans to buy business performance management and OLAP database vendor Hyperion Solutions Corporation for approximately US $3.3 billion.

Last weekend I had a conversation with an uncle who recently retired from his accounting job at a large university. His family was financially secure, the children were grown (with his first grandchild on the way), and he was healthy after going through a medical scare years ago.

In my last Advisor, "Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 7: The Single Most Powerful Tool for Managing Peer Motivation" (25 January 2007), I told you about the best tool available for managing peer motivation.

In March 2006, the stories in the press about avian flu and the possibility of a large-scale pandemic were everywhere. The H5N1 virus had seemed to have escaped from its mostly Asian setting to have been found in Poland, Turkey, Azerbajian, Germany, Denmark, and Israel in rapid succession. Governments across the world, which had been mostly reactive to a possible pandemic in the early 2000s, were in full throttle mode to upgrade their pandemic planning and began in earnest to stockpile drugs like Tamiflu.

My last Advisor presented a few of the ownership challenges experienced by sourcing vendors and discussed how the vendor team can approach their part as owner of sourcing initiatives (see "Smart Sourcing: The Ownership Factor for Vendors," 14 February 2007).

Now that companies are making progress with service-oriented architecture (SOA), they are starting to experience some of the costs of success. As more services are developed and more applications are built using those services, the services need to be enhanced to support additional requirements for multiple, simultaneous users.

I was struck by the results of a little micro-survey I conducted over the last six months with three CIOs from mid-sized companies. This was a very informal survey that happened during the course of casual conversations over coffee breaks, lunches, or between sessions at a conference. The topic of measuring IT performance came up.

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.

Business process management (BPM) is a hot management topic and an equally compelling IT product subject these days. True believers are setting up business process management as one of the last remaining sources of competitive advantage as other sources have evaporated. While BPM is a management philosophy first and a class of packaged applications second, you wouldn't know it from the way vendors convey the value of their products.

At the beginning of the year, I said that I doubted that the US Congress would get around to enacting any sort of new data breach regulations because it would simply be too preoccupied with trying to come up with a solution to the disastrous situation in Iraq (see "BI Trends and Developments to Watch for In 2007," 2 January 2007). But n

Recently, I was reviewing an article about a new partnership between Apple and Nike. The partnership had to do with a newly designed Nike running shoe that hooks up with the Apple Nano iPod. The ad on the iPod Web site goes like this:

There are moments in a consultant's life when you find that even your worst assumptions are way too optimistic to match reality. I had such an experience recently while preparing for a retrospective.

The northeastern US recently was pelted by record snowfalls, crushing ice storms, and bitter cold. In Wellington, New Zealand, it was a comfortable (but drizzly) 62 degrees Farenheit, while it was 10 degrees in New York City. No doubt the folks in New Zealand might have shrugged their shoulders when they heard about the plight of New Englanders and those in upstate New York.

More respondents are considering outsourcing some work this year than last, according to those surveyed for the January 2007 issue of the Cutter Benchmark Review . While the percentages of development haven't changed from year to year, we do see a sizable decrease in outsourcing of maintenance (67% to 61%) and help desk (45% to 38%). Last year, 80% of respondents indicated that they were not likely to consider backsourcing, while this year showed a sizable drop in this response (51%).

A key market driver that is helping to accelerate the use of business rules management systems (BRMSs) in corporate IT departments is the embedding of the technology by enterprise software vendors in their various offerings.

The notion of business architecture -- or at least the use of it -- has been evolving rapidly only over the past few years, whereas the concepts that make up the foundation of that business architecture have been around for awhile.