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 that 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.

We've noticed several basic themes about portfolio management in our client work this month that support a fundamental truth: portfolio management (e.g., project prioritization) is basic business governance of IT. This has a number of consequences.

When it comes to an enterprise-wide roll out of a compliance initiative for a large or medium-sized company, it definitely takes more than one expert to resolve all the challenges.

"Organizations need to address privacy not only because it is legally required and the right thing to do, but also because it is necessary for keeping customer trust, maintaining customer loyalty and support, and improving the corporate brand."

-- Rebecca Herold, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

With all the excitement last week resulting from Hewlett-Packard's announcement that it was entering the data warehousing market, another important industry development slipped by largely unnoticed. That was BI leader Cognos acquiring operational BI and dashboards vendor Celequest Corporation.

Earlier this month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs appeared at the annual MacWorld conference to show off the company's new iPhone.

In my last Advisor, "Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 6: Why Team Member Motivation Is a Better Predictor of Team Effectiveness Than Are Technical Skills," 14 December 2006), I told you why motivation is more important than technical skill-set in predicting team effectiveness, and thus performance.

As any parent with small children will tell you, getting them to eat their vegetables can be a trying experience. If only their determination not to eat a single pea, carrot, or green bean, regardless of the coaxing, bribery, or threats involved, could be channeled in more positive directions.

I don't think failure is inevitable in outsourcing agile projects. An outsourcing strategy that fits the nature of strategic stars such as agile projects could have prevented the disaster. However, before I start to lay out an appropriate outsourcing strategy for agile projects, here is one major piece of advice: If you have the choice, don't do it!

In my previous Advisors in this series (see the sidebar), I have submitted my conservative views on getting started with SOA and I have explored the challenges of SOA initiative planning. While addressing these challenges, like many other practitioners, I observed the concept of enterprise service bus (ESB) pop up many times for many of my SOA initiative engagements.

In previous issues in this series, I suggested that there are three aspects to the external technological environment that IT should track and consider. These include the following:

Competitive factors -- plans and moves of traditional and nontraditional business competitors

My new smart, stylish, cool PDA is a pain in the neck to actually use. There are so many features embedded in so many more -- these people have perfected hierarchical menus to everywhere -- that I find it nearly impossible to optimize its performance.

In response to a recent Advisor on important BI and data warehousing trends for 2007 ("BI Trends and Developments to Watch for in 2007," 2 January 2007), one reader inquired as to my thoughts on grid computing architectures, in general, as well as the use of grids for data warehousing and BI.

Much has been made over the last few days about Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) recent announcement that it is entering the market for data warehousing and BI software and services, and how it plans to challenge market leaders Oracle, IBM, Teradata, SAS, Microsoft, and so on.

Over the years, I've found a tendency in large organizations, especially government ones, to equate oversight with control. In fact, as far as I can tell, there is no positive correlation between the amount of oversight and the success of large projects.

In this Advisor, Jim Highsmith shares his list of the top 30 books on agile project leadership. Reading -- or even better, reading and discussing -- these books would be a good New Year's resolution for furthering project leadership in your organization.

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. The Kubler-Ross cycle is a classic of psychology and is largely seen as relating to serious loss, death, or grief.

In my last Advisor ("Smart Sourcing: Getting Your People Ready," 20 December 2006), we discussed the "people" component of getting your organization ready for smart sourcing. Without a doubt, people or the workforce play a significant role in the success of smart sourcing.

Last month, I discussed why Business Rules Management Systems (BRMSs) are increasingly becoming an important part of organizations' service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives (see "The Role of Business Rules Management Systems in Service-Oriented Architectures," 27 December 2006).

collaboration = innovation

The easiest thing of all is to deceive one's self; for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true.

-- Demosthenes (384 BC - 322 BC)

I was recently rereading one of my earliest e-mail Advisors from Cutter Consortium's Agile Project Management Practice (it was actually e-Project management then). The Advisor was about why this different way of managing projects was so important. After reading it, I decided it was time to revisit and update that issue.

The first big data warehousing industry development of the new year is NCR Corporation's announcement that it is splitting into two separate companies.

Everyone -- or most everyone -- likes to think positively about the new year. That's where New Year's resolutions come from. But what about the glass-is-half-empty crowd? How do they ring in the new year?

This Advisor continues the topic of product management that began in Part 1 of this two-part series (see "Product Managers in an Agile Team, Part 1," 28 December 2006).