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.

Corporations that perform well over long periods of time have typically learned how to maximize the performance of their people. They recognize that it is people who make good or bad decisions or who may even avoid making decisions. They strive to create a business environment where employees feel valued and are supported by effective direction -- policies, procedures, standards of performance, guidelines, and tools -- for performing their work.

A friend of mine recently returned from a software development conference where he picked up an introductory copy of a business rules management system (BRMS) development tool. I asked him what he planned to do with it, and he said he had no plans, really, because he "didn't want to learn some new development language." Basically, he said he couldn't see writing rules to create applications he could more easily develop just by writing code.

In his recent E-mail Advisor, titled "Software as a Service," Mike Rosen, the Director of Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Architecture Practice, does a great job of identifying some of the technological advancements which are making "SaaS" a viable solution for a variety of application requirements.

Although everyone's known that it's been in the works for some time now, Microsoft last week finally revealed its plans for its upcoming on-demand CRM offering: "Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live."

One important fact to keep in mind when considering Microsoft's planned entry into the CRM software as a service (SaaS) market, is that it will not become generally available until sometime in mid-2007 for North America, with other locales to follow.

We think that this is a great time to focus on IT innovation because, as George Westerman, a research scientist with Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) points out in the May 2006 issue of Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR), innovation is alive and well in IT shops around the world, after years of tightening budgets and requests for keeping the lights on utilizing fewer and fewer resources.

An IT management idea that has not outlived its usefulness suggests how improved might be the performance of the IT organization were its members to undergo communications skills training. Put a router in a computer jock's hands and he's happy. Put him in front of a capital planning committee to justify the IT shop's 20% budget increase request and the result might be an audience recommendation to stick with routers.

I always enjoy the annual Cutter Summit conference. At this wonderful event, I have a chance to talk to a lot of old friends and Cutter clients and, most important, I always meet and learn from people who I haven't heard from before. This year was no exception: there were great talks about wikis, open source, and technology roadmapping planning. However, there was also something I find distressing: there was still an inordinate amount of discussion about code and coding.

Given how besieged organizations must feel today by both the growth in the incidence of information security breaches and the types of information security breach techniques that result in those breaches, the knee-jerk reaction is to throw money at perceived problems -- or at breaches that have already occurred -- in the hopes that this will constitute effective risk management. A more level-headed approach is to balance information security spending against actual risk.

In an earlier Advisor (see " Management's Performance Levers," 29 June 2006), I discussed the fact that, over the last four to five years, I've worked with a significant number of product companies in implementing agile development and project management practices.

Shared services and business process offshoring have in common some basic principles around the focus on value and accountability, so is the existence of a shared services (SS) model the optimal condition for organizational readiness in business process offshoring?

As enterprise architecture becomes more commonplace, many organizations realize that they don't have the appropriate level of skills in-house to staff the positions. An obvious approach is to look to a training program. In discussions about training, I'm often asked about certification programs for enterprise architects. Given that EA is a relatively new field, there aren't a lot of options for certification as yet, and just as important, there aren't any specific certifications that are generally recognized within the industry.

Last year, I submitted to you three perspectives for aligning business and IT in delivering business value: setting the right ground rules to begin the initiatives ("Setting the Ground Rules," 20 July 2005) and developing effective IT strategies to get business organizations engaged from the early stages of alignment initiatives ("Developing Effective IT Strategies," 3 August 2005), and recognizing the complexitie

A recent discussion on the NewGrange list server [1] began with the question, "Is there really anything that a project manager does that is more important than risk management?" As the discussion unfolded, there was a general consensus that a risk-centered perspective would definitely stand any project management in good stead. With that in mind, I would like to suggest a few risk-centered activities that are in keeping with an agile risk management.

For some time now, I've been saying that compliance applications have become a major driver for companies to apply business rules management systems (BRMS) (see, for example, "Rule-Based Systems for Customer Privacy Compliance," 10 May 2005).

I am working on a large project with a group of people on the opposite coast. I visit them once or twice a month for face-to-face discussions. On a recent visit, I learned a lot about improving productivity from some unexpected places.

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.

In my last Advisor (see "Agile: A Set of Methods and Skills or a Leadership Mindset and Culture?" 1 June 2006), I argued that agile methods won't thrive unless the IT leadership mindset and culture is itself agile, and for most agile experts, that implies collaborative leadership.

The commoditization of IT, along with the low success rate of IT projects, has fueled the desire of corporate management to see realistic ROI numbers for IT expenditures. No longer will senior management accept the "We must innovate or be left behind" argument that got previous IT projects approved.

Cutter Consortium recently surveyed 132 organizations worldwide to explore interest in and adoption of various relatively new IT technologies. Dennis Adams, chairman of the Decision and Information Sciences Department in the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston (Texas, USA), analyzed the data on IT Trends in 2006, and here are his thoughts on the trend of outsourcing:

An IT management idea that has not outlived its usefulness suggests how improved might be the performance of the IT organization were its members to undergo communications skills training. Put a router in a computer jock's hands and he's happy. Put him in front of a capital planning committee to justify the IT shop's 20% budget increase request and the result might be an audience recommendation to stick with routers.

A while ago, I took part in a meeting aimed at project scope definition. The goal of the meeting was to define the main aspects of business context, which required application of quite advanced statistical analysis tools (statistical scoring cards) in the scope of operational business processes decision supporting tasks (liabilities collection process).

A couple of weeks ago, I discussed recent Cutter research that found that just 10% of (end-user) organizations surveyed say they are currently running a data warehouse or data mart on Linux (see "Corporate Adoption of Open Source Linux for Data Warehousing," 20 June 2006).

WinFS is one of a set of frameworks that make up Vista's "Windows .NET Framework Extension" (WinFX). This is a superset of the .NET Framework, which is at the heart of Microsoft's .NET [1]. Alongside WinFS, WinFX also includes Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously Indigo), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, previously Avalon), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).