IT-enabled business transformations occur when technology is used to fundamentally alter the way business is conducted in an industry. The organization that successfully implements the industry-altering technology can gain a competitive advantage so profound that others in the industry can no longer compete and either go out of business or, upon implementing "me too" technologies, find regaining customers to be extremely difficult.

By far the biggest news out of the Oracle OpenWorld Conference was Oracle's announcement that it will "support" Red Hat Linux. Just in case you missed this bombshell, the new "Oracle Unbreakable Linux" will be almost exactly like the open source operating system (OS) distributed by Red Hat. The main differences are that Oracle will strip the Red Hat trademarks from the software and Oracle will offer support services for about half of what Red Hat charges. Oracle also says it will support older versions of the OS.

It's hardly news to anyone that innovation in software represents a competitive necessity for vendors and a source of performance improvement and even competitive advantage for the organizations that invest in it. Open Source software development models are grabbing the attention of managers from both populations, as these arrangements can accelerate both innovation and performance improvements; Open Source might represent the single most fascinating trend in enterprise software going forward.

Where are we going and why? These are simple questions that should be answered at the start of every project and are, at least in theory, answered by the stakeholders and sponsors rather than by the project team itself. A problem arises when the team doesn't own the mission and the goal -- then what gets delivered never matches the desired result.

All big failures look alike.

-- Ken Orr

In the first part of this Advisor (see "Who Says IT Staff Can't Manage Outsourcing Deals? Key Skills for Outsourcing Professionals, Part 1"), I asserted that relationship management skills, such as skills for negotiation, collaboration, and communication, are an outsourcing professional's cornerstone skills. Yet these types of skills are typically underdeveloped among functional professionals.

There's been a lot of talk lately about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. There's been even more talk around why the heck there's so much talk -- as both terms have achieved overhyped buzzword status. But underneath all the hype there is some fundamental value.

In this Advisor, I relate my experience of two situations in which I observed that the effective use of earned value management (EVM) can make a difference in business-IT alignments.

In a perfect world, the process of software development should consist of a series of appropriately selected steps, each of which clarifies some aspect of the system as we proceed from inception to deployment. Done properly, there should be no "and then a miracle happens" steps along the way, as can occur when we dive right into the code after throwing together some concepts on the back of an envelope.

It takes a lot of work to do charge-out of any kind. From our perspective, a simple corporate cost center, one not allocated at the end of the year to business units, is surely easier than any alternative. This means that business units and IT never argue about allocation formulas or usage. It also means that budget negotiations each year are simple, involving only the corporate budget process.

Although text-mining technology has been available for years, its use has been relegated mainly to government agencies (e.g., intelligence services) and companies whose business largely has to do with handling or processing textual information (e.g., news organizations, wire services). The major roadblock standing in the way of more mainstream business use of text mining technology has been the high degree of expertise and specialized skills required to build and use applications.

A rookie baseball player on a single-A farm team bobbles the ball and allows two runners to score. "He's learning the true finesse of the game," we contend, willing to forgive and forget. After all, it's not the major leagues. But management fires him. A multimillion-dollar star for the Washington Nationals bobbles the ball and allows two runners to score. We shout, "Fire the bum! I can't believe he's even getting paid for this!" It's just a game, and yet our reactions and behaviors are radically different. Does management "fire the bum?" No.

Thanks to 900-pound retail gorillas like Wal-Mart, suppliers large and small have had to relentlessly streamline and automate their operations. One such mandated business process is the Advance Ship Notice (ASN). This is a requirement for suppliers to provide their customers with electronic notification in advance of shipping their products. There are two main reasons for insisting on these ASNs:

1. In case of missed shipments, customers might want to execute alternate purchasing plans.

Sometimes, when I talk to managers in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland about agile, I get a reply like, "Well, this sounds very American, I doubt that it works in Central Europe." As a matter of fact, there is a growing list of successful agile projects in Central Europe, so the doubt obviously doesn't hold water. Nonetheless, the doubters have deserved more attention than this brisk reply. So I'd like to dig into agile and business culture in this Advisor. I'll discuss German business culture first, before generalizing.

In my previous Advisor ("Smart Sourcing: Where Do We Start?," 20 September 2006), I shared with you a simple yet very useful checklist for deciding who, what, when, and how to source your projects.

In my previous Advisor (see "Doing SOA Right Today, Part 1: Making Sure We're on the Right Track" 27 September 2006), I urged all fellow practitioners in the field not to embark upon SOA initiatives just because everyone else you know is pursuing the transformation of their existing business applications to Web ser

collaboration = innovation

Whenever the performance of a project falls outside nominal values, it will be judged to be a project in distress and likely to fail unless some intervention strategy brings it back under control. How it got to that state is certainly a question that needs answering. But more important is how it can be returned to a state of normalcy -- if at all. A distressed project will have one or more of the following characteristics:

Oracle Corporation announced it bought data integration vendor Sunopis SA for an undisclosed amount. But Oracle already has a pretty good data integration toolset: Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB). So why is Oracle buying Sunopsis?

Recently I argued with some colleagues that the real changes in technology over the past few years have more to do with what no longer matters than anything else. Before I say anything more, this is not an endorsement of Nicholas Carr's now way too famous "IT Doesn't Matter" argument. For the record, I have consistently maintained that operational technology matters a little less than it did but that strategic technology matters more than ever. That said, let's look at what no longer matters operationally and even strategically.

This is the last Advisor, for a while at least, in my series on agile integration. In writing this series over the last few months, I've done a little revision to the categories -- folding compliance into the governance category and creating a performance category. The six categories of agile integration are now: organization, process, performance, alignment, governance, and culture. This Advisor addresses the last of these: culture.

In my last Advisor (see "Foreseeability: Planning for Risk, Part 1," 21 September 2006), we explored a new way of conceiving project risk; how foreseeable is it? To the academics who studied project execution patterns in a dozen plus companies, they concluded that project elements occupy space within four categories of foreseeability risk. The least dangerous and most visible risks, examined in the last Advisor, fall into the categories of variation and foreseen uncertainty.

Although many organizations have successfully outsourced various IT functions for years, reports of outsourcing "failures" (like early termination, significant renegotiation, and unrealized value) still abound. Fortunately, both buyers and providers are getting more adept at diagnosing and addressing their outsourcing problems.

In February, I wrote about service component architecture (SCA) and service data objects (SDO) (see "Service Component Architecture," 1 February 2006, and "Service Data Objects," 15 February 2006), which are emerging specifications for how services can be written and assembled in an industry-standard way. At that time, eight companies had joined together to create and support these specifications. Let's see how this effort is progressing.