When are you supposed to build an economic value model to justify a proposed information technology investment? Whenever your boss says to.

That's the obvious answer. A subtler one rests in building a decisionmaking framework that helps guide organizations in determining the appropriate occasions to undertake an investment assessment.

The CIO or CTO of a fairly large-sized company will normally be someone who is very well versed in technology and (we hope) pretty good at it. In this the 21st century, in fact, almost every senior manager in every department in the enterprise will be IT literate. It has become a survival skill.

If the year ended today, I'd be inclined to say that probably the two most significant events that have taken place concerning the BI world both have to do with Microsoft. The first was Microsoft buying BI and analysis tools vendor ProClarity Corporation back in April. The second was Microsoft announcing plans in June that it intends to market a business performance management application -- Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 -- based on a combination of ProClarity's and Microsoft's own BI technologies.

A friend of mine runs a company that provides remote back-up and recovery. It's a very nice little company that makes money and provides a valuable service to its customers. About a year ago the company piloted its technology at my university. The results were great. They quoted us a price of around US $14 per month per user for automatic, almost limitless back-up with guaranteed recovery of any file within hours. Good stuff.

Will there ever emerge a total and complete solution to the scourge of e-mail spam? The open, ubiquitous spirit of e-mail is under true assault by the morons and nitwits who continue to pound businesses and residences with unwanted, unsolicited messages. Where the force of law continues to fail in helping to solve the problem means the ingenuity of technology must save us from this pestilence. One technological answer, amidst a standards war, is slow to adopt.

In my last Advisor (see " Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 1: Why Is Collaborative Leadership Required for Agile Environments?" 6 July 2006), I began this series by offering some thoughts about why collaborative leadership is necessary for agile environments.

"Can-do thinking makes risk management impossible. Since acknowledging real risk is defeatism, the risk management function in a can-do organization is restricted to dealing with those smallish risks that can be mitigated by quick action. That means you confront all the risks except the ones that really matter." (Tom DeMarco, Why Does Software Cost So Much? .)

Conducting audits of outsourcing deals is not something every organization focuses on. There are usually so many operational fires to be put out that review and compliance processes can easily be overlooked. Imagine, however, if you never reviewed your staff: they may become disinterested and unmotivated, and (worst of all) you may not know what they are actually doing! Outsourcing arrangements are no different.

Strategic work on EA should not be confused with portfolio and project planning. IT strategy is an important input to the project portfolio (and ultimately budget) planning process, but it is not the only one. Any IT organization will have to run both strategically aligned projects as well as projects that respond to the current business units' woes and pains. Confusing the two might push a strategic EA team into too low a level of detail.

The word "service" crops up all over the information technology world. There's service-oriented architecture, managing IT like a business (meaning a service business), the "service catalog" coming out of the ITIL community, service-level agreements (SLAs), and so forth.

The application of business intelligence (BI) to human resources (HR) has not received the same degree of attention as other domains. This is because companies tend to focus their BI efforts where they expect the greatest ROI (e.g., customer analytics, financial analysis, supply chain analysis). In fact, it was only a few years ago that I remember sitting in a conference session in which the speaker said that there was no real payoff to be gained from applying BI to HR operations.

This week, I thought I'd comment on some of the important recent developments that have taken place in the data warehousing extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tools market.

Oracle finally released the latest version of its Oracle Warehouse Builder ETL toolset (version 10G, release 2). This is the eighth release of the product since Oracle started marketing it in 2000.

As the classic "dog days" of summer approach in the Northern Hemisphere, there is a temptation to take a break -- to draw a deep breath and forget about one's individual and organizational worries for a little while. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the price of organizational freedom is eternal vigilance.

In a recent set of columns, I have been thinking aloud about the state of systems thinking and training in IT. I say systems thinking and training because there's been too much focus on computer science education in recent years. In the process, we have focused far too much on programming and programming tricks and far too little on systems and how to design systems and databases to accomplish important business functions that are easy to build, test, deploy, and maintain.

In an earlier Advisor, I 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, and "Management's Performance Levers, Part 2," 13 July 2006).

This past June might be known as the month of the lost business reputations. I don't recall a month when so many seemingly solid corporate reputations have been tarnished.

Let's start with an announcement by the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus in June that it would have to delay deliveries of its A380 super-jumbo jet by yet another six months. The announcement takes Airbus customers -- and the market -- by surprise, leading to a drop of 26% in Airbus stock price in one day.

Is your IT organization entitled to be the supplier of information services for your company? Do they deserve to be? Why? Are they the best, most competitive supplier of quality services? Do they even think they have competition? They should -- because every company needs to have accurate, timely, available information when and where they need it and be able to get it from the best supplier around.

It seems like architecture as an IT profession has finally hit the big time, judging by conferences if nothing else. Last week I presented at Dr. Dobb's Architecture and Design World 2006 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. This is not the first time I've presented at an architecture conference, but it is the first time I remember being impressed by how many people were present.

We all seem to have a morbid curiosity about how we compare to others -- how we compare to others in our industry or peer group in terms of spending on IT, or MIPS per employee, or whatever.

Although central architecture is generally effective in managing the IT infrastructure, enterprise IT architecture efforts often fail to extend their influence beyond that. A recent enterprise IT architecture (EITA) effort by a global leader in the marketing, travel, and hospitality industries spent US $12 million on service-oriented architecture (SOA) before the project was halted for lack of business ROI. This case is typical of EITA failures, which often progress as follows: The EITA effort is driven by IT management through a central IT architecture group, as discussed above.

I was talking recently with a colleague who is involved in a business performance management initiative. The subject quickly turned to one of the most important challenges associated with such an effort: identifying key performance indicators (KPIs). This Advisor summarizes what we discussed.

Basically, there are a number of techniques useful for identifying KPIs for business performance management efforts. But the reality is that, more than likely, organizations are going to have to utilize multiple techniques.

I was talking recently with a colleague who is involved in a business performance management initiative. The subject quickly turned to one of the most important challenges associated with such an effort: identifying key performance indicators (KPIs). This Advisor summarizes what we discussed.

Basically, there are a number of techniques useful for identifying KPIs for business performance management efforts. But the reality is that, more than likely, organizations are going to have to utilize multiple techniques.

We often encounter CIOs with a common complaint: business executives demand more business impact and less cost from IT. When we explore the issues with these CIOs, we discover that the problem is more fundamental: the IT organization has been incapable of communicating IT's business impact to business executives. That is, other than IT's cost (the cost of IT borne by the business units), the IT organization has not (credibly) communicated the impact and value of what they do to the business executives who pay the bills.

Countless self help groups meet each day throughout the world, and all start with the same premise, adapted from the original AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) Twelve-Step program: "First, admit you have a problem."

In this, the last installment of my three-part series on LoTech -- HiFi (for parts one and two, see "Part 1: The Evolution of Story Cards and User Stories," 23 March 2006, and "Part 2: The Cost of Tracking Tools," 11 May 2006), we will look at ways to take metrics beyond "how fast" or "how much."