Over the past few years, I have been working with companies to alleviate the risks they face in creating business-IT alignment. From the plethora of publications available today on this topic, I recognize that most IT organizations are working quite diligently to achieve an optimal business-IT alignment as a measure toward their cost-cutting efforts. In my opinion, these efforts are not being exerted to create mere harmony or coexistence between business and IT organizations.

That apparently innocent question was at the base of some discussion at the 2006 conference of the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group (EUSprig) and Excel training classes. Taxonomies (classifications) of spreadsheet errors have been presented in journals and at Eusprig conferences that classify:

The current trend whereby organizations are seeking to extend business intelligence (BI) capabilities to increasing numbers of end users (including those residing beyond the corporate firewall) has placed renewed emphasis on a frequently underestimated but hugely important aspect of the data warehouse lifecycle: managing the data warehouse/BI environment.

Data warehouse/BI administration and management involves a number of tasks, including the following:

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.

Early in my career, I worked for one of the leading authorities in the field of linear programming (LP) [1]. This person had developed one of the earliest LP codes while he was working for an oil company. Oil companies figured out early on how to use LP to optimize their refinery operations, so LP was a big deal for them.

A friend of mine asked me recently whether I knew of any list of rules for project managers that he could review to help him with his next book. I pointed him to the list of 100 rules from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Project Manager Jerry Madden, but it got me thinking about what might be on my own list and why.

As I write this, hurricane experts at Colorado State University have announced a revision to their May 2006 prediction that nine hurricanes could potentially threaten the US to "only" seven, three of which are likely to be severe. This forecast is down from the five severe hurricanes that they had predicted in May. A cooler tropical Atlantic Ocean and a warming eastern Pacific are the reasons they give for this revised forecast.

In the barrage of advice on how to successfully manage a business process offshoring project, a crucial piece of advice can be lost: manage the project as if it were a capital investment requiring a business case, including a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis.

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").

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.