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.

Last week, Oracle announced that it had acquired the intellectual property assets of Sigma Dynamics, a developer of real-time predictive analytics. Oracle plans to use Sigma Dynamics technology to enhance the analytic capabilities of its BI, CRM, and various enterprise applications offerings.

In the field of enterprise architecture, many architects are very critical of John Zachman's well-known framework. A number of extensions have been proposed for the framework (see, for example, the work of Cutter Senior Consultant Ken Orr, including his Executive Report "Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling").

A year or so ago, I got some water on the keyboard of my laptop. Immediately thereafter, the delete key on my laptop stopped working. When you hit the delete key, it no longer sent a signal, or worse, it would begin to send a stream of delete signals to the computer like it was being depressed repeatedly. This happened only at certain points, such as when I opened Microsoft Outlook.

With this Advisor, I return to my series on agile integration (see sidebar). This is the sixth in the series and considers governance.

Even the most innocuous-seeming technology can't escape the malevolent grip of information security risks today. Like the cute ground squirrel carrying bubonic plague, instant messaging, a harmless enough technology on its face, is the facilitator of some truly ghastly viruses and worms.

Given the poor track record of success for long-term, large-scale outsourcing agreements, it is no wonder that a growing number of organizations are seriously considering taking a new path for their sourcing strategies. Rather than give up on the idea of outsourcing entirely, many organizations are adopting a more selective, or "out-tasking," approach aimed at downsizing the scope of their third-party agreements in order to increase the likelihood of their success.

Two important events took place recently in the business process management (BPM) market. The first is when Oracle cut a technology licensing and marketing agreement with business process analysis (BPA) and modeling tools vendor IDS Scheer. The second is IBM's announcement that it intends to buy BPM/enterprise content management vendor FileNet Corporation.

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.

IT managers and executives alike see time accounting as dreaded paperwork -- a drudge activity that satisfies the auditors and ensures vendors get paid. Most IT time accounting systems reflect this mentality -- providing a rear-view-mirror illustration of how IT resources were spent in the previous month or quarter. IT organizations are missing a major opportunity by not viewing time accounting as a strategic initiative that gives their managers the ability to get the most business value from their expensive IT resources.

Several important developments affecting the open source business intelligence (BI) market were announced last week at LINUXWORLD, in San Francisco, California, USA. The first was by Adaptive Planning, which introduced what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first open source business performance management offering. The second was by JasperSoft Corporation, which announced a new reporting product.

Ten to fifteen years ago, a lot was being written about the concept of coopetition. This was just at the beginning of the huge growth in technology -- capabilities, products, companies, and, of course, stock value. Well, things have cooled off a bit since then; however, the concept is just as relevant today, if not more so. We just don't hear much about it because most companies have learned how to better manage their relationships with vendor partners.

I recently bought some computers for some family members and while it wasn't horrible to set them up (with color coded cables and all) it reminded me that while we've made tremendous progress over the past twenty years, we're still largely slaves to mechanical devices connected to each other -- though not necessarily the Web -- with cables. We also still use a lot of paper and ink.

In earlier Advisors, I have discussed that over the last four or five years, I've worked with a significant number of product companies in implementing agile development and project management practices (see "Management's Performance Levers, Part 1," 29 June 2006, "Management's Performance Levers, Part 2," 13 July 2006, and "Management's Performance Leve

Every family has one. It's the individual who comes to visit, and as soon as he/she arrives at the door, all are aware it will be a long row to hoe. The conversation will be awkward; the messages will be mixed and the frustration will be palpable. But, as this individual walks out the door, we find ourselves saying those magic words -- "Don't be a stranger!" We could prevent these awkward moments in simple fashion. Banish this individual from our lives forever. Refuse access. Deny admission.

Do you have a formal plan for the business you do with each of your strategic vendors? A plan that not only describes the nature of your joint business relationship but also defines the obligations, commitments, and investments that will be made by both parties? A plan that clearly states the strategic objectives of the partnership and the metrics by which initiatives will be measured? A plan that has been jointly developed by both parties that defines the "skin" that both partners bring to the game?

Perhaps there's still room on your reading list for one more title. Even if there's not, this is one you want to consider for your bookshelf. Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage, published by Addison-Wesley, is an essential reference for anybody involved in database design.