In the December 2006 issue of the Cutter IT Journal ("Sourcing: Out or In?"), I wrote an article titled "Smart Sourcing: Myths, Truths, and Realities." In that article, I presented a set of seven steps for performing re

User participation is beneficial for software projects and increases the likelihood of success. Yet, we take it for granted that some form of participation is necessary on all projects. There are different ways in which users can participate in an IS project.

Last year, several of the leading BI vendors -- starting with IBI and Cognos, followed by Microstrategy and Business Objects -- introduced new products that combine the reporting and analysis capabilities of BI tools with the ease of use of familiar search engines.

Over the past few months, I've asked a number of CIOs and CTOs whether, if they had a technology do-over, they would still install their enterprise applications. Not one of them said they would. Why not? Because it took each of them years to get the software to work and, in some cases, the projects cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

In my last Advisor (see "A Recipe for Success," 8 February 2007), I introduced David Anderson's recipe for success: focus on quality, reduce work-in-progress, balance capacity against demand, prioritize.

When you are an organization that has been around for 142 years, it can be assumed that you know how to manage risk. When you haven't issued a profit warning ever in those 142 years, it can be assumed you know how to manage risk very well indeed. When you unexpectedly issue one, like the British bank HSBC did, eyebrows go way up.

Over the years, I have learned one thing really well. That is, it doesn't matter how good or how influential a consultant you may be -- when it comes to making a change happen in an individual client organization or for the entire client company, you really don't own anything. In my experience, you are a facilitator, supporting your client executive(s) to make the change happen.

Every once in awhile, you stumble across something interesting in a related area that could have some relevance to your job or otherwise. This week I'd like to share such a discovery with you. While researching collaboration, I bumped into SCORM, the Shared Content Object Reference Model.

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 application second, you wouldn't know it from the way vendors convey the value of their products.

According to a recent Cutter Consortium survey, the number one problem confronting organizations in their efforts to implement text mining applications is data integration/data volume issues associated with handling unstructured and semi-structured data. Approximately 80%-90% of corporate data resides in unstructured and semistructured format.

I've been working with a client that is trying to learn about SOA, helping the team to implement a pilot project. Although it's a fairly junior team, the problems they are encountering are not limited to inexperience. I've seen the same confusion at many different clients. They don't understand the relationship -- or difference -- between SOA and the user interface (UI).

Open source BI tools leader JasperSoft Corporation has released an open source data extract, transformation, and loading (ETL) tool. Called "JasperETL," this tool adds data integration capabilities for data warehousing and BI to the JasperSoft BI Suite, which consists of JasperServer (report server), JasperAnalysis (OLAP), JasperReports (end-user reporting), and iReport (report designer).

A year ago, my friend and Cutter associate Enterprise Architecture Practice Director Mike Rosen was waxing enthusiastic about a new Bluetooth headset that he had just acquired. What impressed him was the "smart button" on the device. Depending on what you were doing, it would put a call on hold, retrieve a call, or do a couple of other things.

One of the reasons the Agile Manifesto has had significant influence on software development is its simplicity: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, responding to change over following a plan.

Once conventional becomes, well, conventional, offering an alternative reality bears similarity to standing in front of a downhill runaway train and thinking this will stop it. It's conventional wisdom's fierce momentum that prevents a competing worldview from getting any mindshare.

Offshoring risks are many and they are generally understood in the same contexts as risks related to IT project or information security management. First, in terms of probabilities that identified undesirable events will or will not occur as the project or initiative is executed. And secondly, in terms of the source of the occurrence of those bad events -- financial, people, technical, geographic, and so on. But another approach to risk assessment exists that can provide managers a fresh understanding of the risks involved in offshoring.

There is a lot of talk in the EA community about the increased focus on the business architecture (see for example, Enterprise Architecture Practice Director Mike Rosen's "The Rise of Business Architecture," 10 January 2007).

collaboration = innovation

Quite often, people complain that they have been asked to provide an estimate before they have enough information.

This usually happens in the very early stages of a software project, but will also occur anytime we need to look at a major change. We need to figure out how long it will take to get the job done.

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.

The recent announcement by TJX Companies, Inc. that its computer systems had been compromised, leading to credit and debit card purchase information being stolen and used for fraudulent purposes, dramatically underscores the nasty experience that companies can expect to go through should they suffer a customer data breach.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Wal-Mart is rolling out new software that will allow it to better allocate the amount of workers based upon customer occupancy in stores at any given time [1]. The approach is rather crude but when Wal-Mart does anything involving technology it is worth exploring.

Continuing with my ten tips for an agile project manager, tip number four is "practice management by wandering around" (MBWA) (for tips one, two, and three, see "Ten Tips for an Agile Project Manager, Part 1," 10 August 2006, "Agile Project Success Factors -- Red

"At TJX, we are fully committed to operating our business with the highest standards of business ethics, not merely in accordance with applicable law. We expect our vendors to maintain these same high standards." Or so reads a statement on the Massachusetts, USA-based $16-billion, off-price apparel retailer's Web site.

Ensuring success in a globally operating virtual team requires autonomous local decision making. To achieve this, you need well-defined handoffs between players that allow this autonomy, while guaranteeing an expected outcome. Such an arm's-length approach creates a relationship that is focused upon results that produce few or no surprises. Scrupulously negotiated handoffs enable you to steer clear of the pitfalls of micromanaging both deliverables and people in a remote location.