At the heart of attaining strategic alignment is identifying and pursuing those initiatives, projects, and programs that best support or enable the organization's goals and objectives.

As organizations carry out their business performance management initiatives, they are increasingly finding it necessary to provide their metrics, scorecards, and other analytics with access to current data from operational systems. The trouble is, the quality of this real-time operational data is suspect. This is because operational data sources rarely go through the rigorous cleansing processes routinely applied to sourced data before it is loaded into the organization's traditional (i.e., ETL-based) data warehouses and data marts.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

-- General Dwight D. Eisenhower

I am fascinated by the continued conversations about EA's return on investment. They are especially exciting when we're actually able to conjure up tangible cost-saving projections to justify our investment in EA.

A friend of mine was discussing a large custom system that his organization was in the process of acquiring. "The vendor is recommending that we use a code-generator that they have developed to handle the complex stuff in a Java environment. I wonder whether this is going to work out any differently than the CASE stuff that we did in the late 1980s and early 1990s?"

"Why do you think the vendor is going this way?" I asked.

In my last Advisor (Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 5: Why Project Teams Are Easier to Build Than Management Teams, 9 November 2006), I told you that project teams are the most straight-forward teams in which to develop high-performance dynamics because they fit the classic laboratory definition of a team.

One of the biggest information security decisionmaking challenges is finding economic value data that makes an ROI calculation for a security investment useful. Unfortunately, no magic bullet exists to resolve the problem, but a couple of stand-in approaches to the exploration of value might help.

Any manager knows that demonstrating the ROI of information security products is problematic at best. One of the biggest challenges is coming up with baseline data against which to measure a performance improvement and therefore value.

Strategic IS alignment refers to alignment between business and IS strategies, but the IS strategy is sometimes viewed in a narrow fashion, including only the role of the IS function (i.e., what does it aim to do?). I recommend a broader view of alignment, incorporating not simply the role of the IS function, but also the structure of the IS function (i.e., how IS activities are organized within the organization) and the sourcing of the IS function (i.e., which IS activities should be performed within the organization).

In my last two Advisors in this series (please see the sidebar) "Doing SOA Right Today, Part 1: Making Sure We''re on the Right Track" 27 September 2006 and "Doing SOA Right Today, Part 2: Resolving the Initiative Planning Challenges," 18 October 2006)

collaboration = innovation

To work collaboratively, we need to release these inhibitions to innovation:

In my previous Advisor in this series ("Getting the Business and IT Aligned, Part 1: Myths, Mysteries, and Realities," November 29, 2006), I shared a number of myths, mysteries, and realities for business-IT alignment in the fields of enterprise integration and business process transformation. I believe that business-IT alignment initiatives are not "one off" initiatives that happen in isolation, detached from other enterprise-level initiatives.

There seems to be a bit of confusion within the agile community about the concept of self-organization. To some it seems to be a euphemism for anarchy and an excuse to rail against management in general and project management in particular. I think this "anti-management" faction helps critics relegate agile to a "small-project, fringe" movement, which is unfortunate. Self-organizing isn't about anarchy or lack of leadership, it's about empowerment (or in the old school, delegation) and style of leadership.

BI leader Business Objects has bought software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and on-demand CRM applications provider Nsite, Inc., for an undisclosed amount. Nsite offers a Web services platform and a set of on-demand CRM applications targeted at small and mid-size organizations seeking to add sales process automation to their CRM systems.

Mad cow disease, bird flu, airplane accidents, E. coli outbreaks, and shark attacks. I don't often get the chance to read Time magazine, but a cover story entitled, "Things That We Often Worry About (But Really Shouldn't)" caught my eye this week at an airport magazine stand. I was on my way to brief a CEO and his board of directors, and a topic for discussion was the things that people worry about when outsourcing.

In recent years, application developers have pioneered techniques that enable them to work in an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) manner, and now we're going one step further with agile methods that are also highly collaborative. Unfortunately, many data professionals are still mired in the traditional, serial approaches of the late 1970s and 1980s. As a result, they're discovering that they need to play catch-up if they're to remain relevant within the new environment.

"What did you know, and when did you know it?"

That query was the signature phrase from the Watergate hearings some 30 years ago in the US, which was looking into illegal activities conducted by the Nixon Whitehouse. It was resurrected during the recent HP boardroom leak flap about who knew what when regarding HP investigators illegally pre-texting corporate board members' and reporters' identities to uncover personal information about them.

Choosing the right offshore outsourcing vendor is certainly as much art as science, since the decision can turn on a number of quantitative as well as qualitative criteria. The first step in building a vendor selection framework must begin with an understanding of the overall nature of the relationship. Once this is established, a number of specific criteria emerge that can guide the selecting organization.

Enterprise architecture (EA) has always been one of many terms with overloaded meaning. To some of us, EA is about "organizing multiple applications in an enterprise into a coherent whole" [1]. This view points out the difference between architecting an individual application versus architecting a collection of applications that support a business unit or an entire organization. It is not unlike comparing architecting a single building to working on an entire city plan.

The only eternal truths are death, taxes, and change. Companies should know this. They experience change often. Ask Kodak, as it dies ever so slowly due to the profound change in technology that is influencing consumer preferences in the photography universe.

The only eternal truths are death, taxes, and change. Companies should know this. They experience change often. Ask Kodak, as it dies ever so slowly due to the profound change in technology that is influencing consumer preferences in the photography universe.

The world of the blogosphere, based on the key elements of the Web and the machinery of blogs, is a rich and intensely social place. While broadcast media is based on a one-to-many dynamic, where the organization publishing pushes "content" to an "audience," the user experience of reading blogs is many to many, much more like hanging out at a noisy dinner party than watching television.

Back in 2002, when I wrote the Executive Report "Transitioning Business Application Components to Web Services" for Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Architecture advisory service, I described service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a next big thing. Little did I know then, like many other practitioners, that we would experience such an industry-wide push to use SOA today. I can report today that SOA is here and it is here to stay.

One bit of news that seems to have slipped in under the radar screen is Informatica Corporation's announcement that it is buying unstructured and semi-structured data integration vendor Itemfield for US $55 million in cash. With this acquisition, Informatica now has the technology to transform its flagship PowerCenter product into a "universal data integration platform" that can handle structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data integration and transformation. From a market perspective, this is important.

All of the benefits that arise from a company adopting social media as a means to better communicate with customers, partners, and, yes, even competitors hold true within the firm, inside the firewall. A business is a network of conversations within the firewall, and providing blogs as a way for people to better conduct those conversations can be a great way to support or foster them.

There seems to be a bit of confusion within the agile community about the concept of self-organization. To some it seems to be a euphemism for anarchy and an excuse to rail against management in general and project management in particular. I think this "anti-management" faction helps critics relegate agile to a "small-project, fringe" movement, which is unfortunate. Self-organizing isn't about anarchy or lack of leadership, it's about empowerment (or in the old school, delegation) and style of leadership.

Time Magazine published a very interesting cover story this week that those who have a keen interest in information security and risk management would do well to read. It is entitled, "How Americans Are Living Dangerously." Its chief argument is that people dwell on remote risks and spend less time mitigating risks in their lives that have a much higher chance of occurring. Is this your organization?