In this Advisor on agile integration, I return to the organization; specifically to improving organizational performance. One question that comes up often, particularly with large IT organizations is, "How do agile methods fit with our CMMi initiative?" In answering this question, we first need to look at the larger issue of improving overall organizational or enterprise performance.

Two tragedies struck in recent weeks: the loss of 49 lives at a Kentucky airfield and the loss of one life off the coast of Australia. Both episodes made the news as evidence of risks taken, perils faced, and lives lost. For those who missed the events, the 27 August crash of a Comair Canadair Regional Jet at the Lexington, Kentucky, USA, airfield claimed 49 lives. The jet was on the wrong runway and literally ran out of road.

In my previous Advisor for Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Architecture advisory service (see "User's Needs Analysis or Requirements Analysis?" 7 June 2006), I argued that it's not always safe or wise to entrust all requirements analysis to the contractor.

In my last Advisor (see "Domain-Specific Languages," 30 August 2006), I talked about domain-specific languages (DSL), where a DSL defines the design elements, or abstractions, for building solutions in a particular domain, using the concepts, terminology, and notation of that domain.

Over the past few years in the system integration arena, I have seen that the concept of earned value management (EVM) offers a widely accepted project management technique for many US federal government agencies, including the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Several years ago, I attended a meeting in an unfamiliar building with a group of unfamiliar people. I sat at the meeting table, and the person to my right began talking. It was obvious that this person was in charge by his demeanor. He seemed to know most if not all of the people in the room and all about the subject of the meeting.

I was lost. As I said earlier, I didn't know who this person was, I didn't know who the other people were, and I was ignorant of the subject of the meeting.

For years now, CIOs have contended with business management's questions about the value of IT. But this is only half of the issue: CIOs also have to contend with the cost of IT. In our experience, the ways in which IT cost is managed -- how IT's cost affects the business units -- is a critical element of IT management and governance. For example, it's hugely different whether business units pay for IT (with fungible money) or whether the costs are assigned to them. In either case, knowing what the costs are is critical.

The purpose of enterprise decision management (EDM) is to automate (and impart consistency to) the decisions associated with such activities as marketing, product recommendation (i.e., personalization), pricing, workflow management, and compliance. To date, most of EDM coverage has focused on the use of business rules management systems (BRMS) for implementing the decision processing functionality underlying EDM applications.

In my last Advisor (see "Working Around the Delete Key, Part 1," 24 August 2006), I told the story of how I had spent a year or more getting around a malfunctioning delete key on my laptop. The article pointed out the lengths to which I, a fairly savvy computer user, was willing to go to avoid giving up my principal computer. This article is about some of the thoughts this experience brought to mind.

A recent discussion on NewGrange (a project management discussion list I moderate) had to do with the role of planning in ensuring project success. In my mind, planning is a perfectly good word that has gotten hijacked.

In June of this year, Toyota and its Lexus brand took the top spot in 11 out of 19 vehicle categories in the J.D. Power and Associates' automotive quality survey. Yet less than a month later, Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe bowed deeply in front of the world's press, publicly apologizing for the numerous quality problems that recently have been plaguing Toyota automotive products.

Readers of last week's Advisor (see "Verifying the Value of Offshoring, Part 1," 31 August 2006) were introduced to the idea that the exploration of value created from an offshoring initiative is the last but not least important component of total management in the offshoring lifecycle.

When implementing a SOA, one of the biggest challenges is what service gets implemented first. Merely putting an SOA wrapper in front of an existing application runs the risk of tying the functions of your SOA architecture to the stove-piped legacy systems that you currently have. To identify the first SOA application, you really need a clear understanding of your overall SOA strategy -- and that takes time.

Conjure the image of the UN chambers, where delegates from around the world, their ears hidden behind headphones, listen with rapt attention as a colleague delivers an oration from the podium. The only thing permitting members from vastly different cultures and languages to work together is the army of translators who take the speaker's utterances and convert them into the native tongues of the audience. Would that this were so in the multilingual inner sanctum of information technology.

I'd like to take a moment to introduce the concept of virtually private networks. No, I don't mean virtual private networks (VPNs). I mean publicly available networks that contain information that is limited in its scope to a discrete class of user. I mean networks protected by the language barrier.

SeeWhy Software is offering a version of its real-time BI platform free for download. With SeeWhy Community Edition, SeeWhy Software is stealing a page from the open source community's strategy in order to accelerate interest in its products and services.

While many people may view governance as a bureaucratic burden, it is a necessary part of corporate life. Governing, especially financial governing, is part of what executives and managers must do as part of their fiduciary responsibility to all business stakeholders, including employees. From a project perspective, governance relates to making sure that monies spent provide the benefits and returns that were projected.

Last week, a client of mine who is a senior VP of software development told me, "My CFO declared that fully one-third of our work should be in India within the next two years." For me, it wasn't that the directive was about outsourcing to India that was shocking. What caught my attention was that the mandate was coming from the head of finance, the CFO. The top bean counter was the one directing this decision, not the head of engineering.

Would you like to be a master team builder, leader, or mate? If so, then here is a multiple-choice question for you: What is the number-one predictor of group cohesion and thus high-performance teamwork?

There must be a certain amount of schadenfreude in the oil industry at the continued hammering UK energy giant BP PLC is receiving in the international press. BP, which is the second largest oil company in the world behind ExxonMobil, has over the past several years touted itself as the environment-friendly, socially conscious oil company as opposed to its rivals, especially ExxonMobil. However, a series of events over the past 18 months have tarnished BP's once sterling reputation.

There must be a certain amount of schadenfreude in the oil industry at the continued hammering UK energy giant BP PLC is receiving in the international press. BP, which is the second largest oil company in the world behind ExxonMobil, has over the past several years touted itself as the environment-friendly, socially conscious oil company as opposed to its rivals, especially ExxonMobil. However, a series of events over the past 18 months have tarnished BP's once sterling reputation.

Consultants hit in the early 1990s on the fact that building into a corporate culture the capacity to learn and enhance skills would prove an important organizational characteristic for the 21st century. This is no less true in business process offshoring.

While traveling on my vacation in Denmark, I found myself thinking about design. You might wonder why I'd be thinking about that while sitting in a cafe drinking a nice cold Carlsberg. The reason is that design is everywhere here. Scandinavia, and Denmark in particular, are known for their design and its simplicity and elegance. It's a mixture of form married to function based on efficiency, which is evident in everyday objects such as furniture, kitchen utensils, tools, and so on.

In part one of this series published in July (see "Evaluating the External Technological Environment," 26 July 2006), I suggested that there are three aspects to the external technological environment that IT should track and consider:

In Part 1 of this Advisor series (see "Errors, Mistakes, and Awareness, Part 1: Errors and Mistakes," 16 August 2006), I made a distinction among human mistakes, software faults, and failures. When we automate something with a fault, it can repeat endlessly with the same erroneous result, as in the story of the sorcerer's apprentice who created an automaton with one desired effect -- fetching water -- but did not know how to stop it.