The old saw about business intelligence (BI) technology is that it was only as effective as the data it analyzed. True but incomplete. The trend today is for an increasing number of organizations to discover that BI technology is as effective as the ability of the targeted user to meaningfully interpret what the software's front end presents from that high-quality data store. What trends and impacts around this class of technology might emerge out of this recognition? They might have more to do with people than actual technology.

In 2002, Cutter Consortium conducted its first comprehensive survey of the state of risk management practice in the IT community [1]. The survey found that some 86% of organizations responding claimed they were practicing risk management, and 51% of those were practicing it in a disciplined, formal manner. From reports in general software literature, surveys on risk management and its relationship to capturing lessons learned, anecdotal experience, and so on, the practice of risk management seems to have grown both generally and in formality over the past four years.

Over the last four to five years, I've worked with a significant number of product companies (software, hardware/software, and software services, for example, on-line banking) in implementing agile development and project management practices. More often than not, these agile transitions are viewed by management as a "development" transition and not a management transition.

Cutter Consortium recently surveyed 132 organizations worldwide to explore interest in and adoption of various relatively new IT technologies. Cutter Fellows Tim Lister and Lou Mazzucchelli analyzed the data on IT Trends in 2006, and here are their thoughts on the topic of outsourcing:

One of the reoccurring themes in the press these days is SaaS or Software-as-a-Service. And, like most hot new buzzwords, it means different things to different people.

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.

No doubt about it, the software as a service (SaaS) model has taken on a life of its own. It seems that hardly a day goes by without some vendor announcing some sort of new service offering. Even the business rules management system (BRMS) vendors are jumping onto the SaaS bandwagon.

There have been a lot of "studies" on job migration and outsourcing over the past five years that try to position outsourcing as something political: outsourcing creates jobs; outsourcing is the inevitable consequence of globalization; outsourcing will destroy the US labor force. But what's really going on? How do we avoid the spin that proponents and critics of outsourcing present every time the topic comes up?

This is, by my records, my 100th Trends Advisor (O.K., I'm compulsive about some things). Over the last four years or so, I have weighed in on a large number of topics, so this seems like an auspicious time to look at the bigger picture: what are the major threads (concepts/trends) that are affecting the business/IT world today? Here's my short list:

Fifty years ago this month, on 30 June 1956, there was a mid-air collision between a United Airlines DC-7 en route to Chicago from Los Angeles and a TWA Lockheed 1049 Super Constellation en route to Kansas City, also from Los Angeles, over the Grand Canyon, that killed 128 passengers and crew (for more details, see the complete story).

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.

Knowledge transfer represents a critical stage in the transition phase of a business process offshoring (BPO) project. Often, the offshore service provider (OSP) staff, although skilled, might lack specific expertise unique to the specific business processes they will oversee.

Compliance applications have become a major driver for organizations to apply business rules management systems (BRMS). By externalizing rules from critical processes and applications, organizations can create a centralized repository of compliance rules that they can apply across different departments, divisions, and channels, thus helping to standardize and coordinate company-wide strategies for meeting company and governmental regulations such as BASEL II, Sarbanes-Oxley, and Do-Not-Call.

The reasons why enterprises pursue systematic knowledge management (KM) are clear: they wish to make people -- and the whole enterprise -- act intelligently to operate more effectively and satisfy their stakeholders better. However, practical issues of how to approach, introduce, or expand KM practices are complex. When KM practices are implemented in an enterprise, the efforts become continual processes that will go on for years.

"What are you doing, Arthur?" he asked quietly. Arthur looked up with a start. He suddenly had a feeling that all this might look slightly foolish. All he knew was that it had worked like a dream on him when he was a child. But things were different then, or rather would be. "I'm trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble," he said. "They're not cavemen," said Ford. "They look like cavemen." Ford let it pass. "I see," he said.

There has been a love-hate relationship between IT and performance measurement ever since IT emerged from the freight elevator, stumbled into the express elevator, emerged on the executive floor, and became a reluctant member of the business's management team. Accountability became the word of the day, along with budgets, controls, standards, and, eventually, key performance indicators (KPIs) and performance reporting.

Practically no area of corporate computing remains untouched by the open source Linux movement. Consequently, a big question on a lot of data warehousing and BI practitioners' minds has been: to what extent are companies actually adopting open source Linux for their data warehousing platforms?

A recent survey we conducted in April 2006 that asked 106 end-user organizations (of various sizes based worldwide) about their plans to use open source BI and data warehousing tools helps provide some insight on this issue.

In recent years, a number of seminal books have helped to define the software security field [1, 2, 5]. The approach to "building security in" introduced in these books has been enhanced and expanded by practitioners and published in various technical articles, including the "Building Security In" series in IEEE Security & Privacy.

Everyone has been complaining about Sarbanes-Oxley and other government-induced compliance formulae for several years now (everybody, of course, except the auditors and the consultants who make their money on compliance and related activities). Technology has become part of the compliance process in some very important ways. Let's talk about the role that IT governance plays in compliance and the frameworks out there to help us all stay legal.

For one of my manufacturing clients, "lean" is in. This client analyzes ergonomics, steps taken, rework, and refit to an excruciating level of detail. In watching this, it has saved hundreds of resource hours on the shop floor and has rendered its organization more responsive and worker-friendly. Its environment makes more sense today from a work perspective than it did just six months earlier.

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.

Experimentation is essential to the growth of all organizations. It fuels the discovery and creation of knowledge and leads to the development and improvement of products, processes, and business models. Without experimentation, we might still use rocks as tools and live in caves. With breakthrough technologies, it is now possible to perform a greater number of experiments in an economically viable way to accelerate the drive toward innovation.

You may know the authors from their Web site, zapthink, which provides analysis on XML, Web services, and service orientation, and which is where I first became aware of the book Service Orient or Be Doomed, by Jason Bloomberg and Ron Schmeltzer.

I was intrigued by the book's catchy title and thought I should give it a look.