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).

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.