We have recently encountered troubled CIOs and IT organizations with common symptoms. These symptoms characterize the uneasy relationship between IT and the rest of the business. As one CIO put it: "my business users do not understand what we do, and worse, do not value what we accomplish for them." As a result, the business users complain loudly about IT in general and about the high costs of IT in particular -- and this is never good.

IT organizations in trouble have the following symptoms in common:

Whenever we head into uncharted territory, whether it is a trip across the country or a lunch with a friend at a new restaurant, we always try to identify where we are or where we are headed by using commonly known reference points. The greater our common familiarity, the more detailed and precise our reference points can be.

Informatica Corporation is the latest software vendor to enter the software as a service (SaaS) market with a number of new announcements. First, Informatica detailed a bold new on-demand strategy. Second, it just introduced connectors for its PowerCenter data integration platform specifically tailored for Salesforce.com customers.

The art of risk management is the art of clairvoyance. Risk management is the ability to both foretell the future and to do something about it. Risk management has long been analyzed in the context of business financials, organizational behavior, project breakdowns, and individual perspectives and attitudes. In each instance, it has largely been focused on the risks of a given point in time and a given set of circumstances based solely on today's knowledge.

Web 2.0 has become kind of a metatag to describe a number of evolving features and capabilities of the protean Internet. One of the most pronounced advancements is the software-as-services trend demonstrated most vividly by Google. What near-term implications does this trend bode for the enterprise?

The US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA -- www.noaa.gov) released its 2006 hurricane forecast this week.

This Advisor on alignment is the fifth in a series on agile integration (see "Agile Integration -- Organizational Processes," 4 May 2006; "Agile Integration -- Assembling a Team," 13 April 2006; "Agile Integration -- Making Agile Work in Organizations," 2 March 2006; and "Agil

There is no shortage of reasons for an organization to offshore business processes and services. Often organizations enthused about the perceived cost reductions and efficiencies from offshoring are blinded to the possibility that at least in the near term, offshoring is a bad idea. What reasons could emerge that tell the company this? There are a lot, in fact.

Last November, I covered the merging of business process management (BPMS) and business rules management systems (BRMS) (see "The Merging of Business Process Management and Business Rules Management Systems," 16 November 2005). I also discussed differences between how the two technologies utilize business rules as well as how they are complementary.

In my previous Advisors in this series (see "The Mythical Business Case -- Part 1: The Limits of Rational Decisions," 8 March 2006 and "The Mythical Business Case -- Part 2," 12 April 2006), I put forward a hypothesis that the growth of uncertainty in modern business changes the rationale of IT investment decisions from a thorough business case analysis to simplifying heuristics such as "flocking

Despite our best efforts and advances in technology, we still have user manuals, and it seems that the vast majority are still poor. I am dismayed because some 20 years ago, I learned a way to write good user manuals. It is possible to have high-quality user manuals and user documentation and the benefits that come with them.

Visioning allows organizations to make statements about the future as they would like to see it. Visioning became popular about 25 years ago and was codified in a technique called "visioning and mastery." It remains a powerful tool for leaders. Two oft-quoted exemplary vision statements are John F.

In a recent Business Intelligence Executive Update (see "BI + Search = Discovery Reporting," Vol. 6, No. 8), I discussed the benefits and enhanced functionality that combining BI and search engine technology brings to BI. I also examined the initial products Information Builders Inc. (IBI) and Cognos introduced that integrate their BI platforms with the search capabilities of the Google Search Appliance and other search engines.

Every year at this time, I find it hard to concentrate. After the Cutter Summit conference, which usually happens early in May, I have so many ideas spinning around in my head, I have trouble sleeping. Too much of a good thing, I guess. The great thing about the Summit is that after a couple of years, you know that you're going to meet someone you didn't know who has some really good idea, or you find someone you've known for a long time but you haven't talked to for a while has been working on a really cool idea.

The art of risk management is the art of clairvoyance. Risk management is the ability to both foretell the future and to do something about it. Risk management has long been analyzed in the context of business financials, organizational behavior, project breakdowns, and individual perspectives and attitudes. In each instance, it has largely been focused on the risks of a given point in time and a given set of circumstances based solely on today's knowledge.

Experienced members of project teams are familiar with the concept of lessons learned, or project "post mortems." These are the discussions that occur near the end or after the end of the project when everyone is ready to move on to something else, but decide to get together to compile a list of things they wished they would have done differently or things they found out during the project. The theory is that these lessons would be recorded for future project teams to read, study, and integrate into their projects.

Despite the rapid growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market, many enterprise decision-makers and application architects are still trying to figure out whether this new software solution model is viable and fits into their existing environments. This point was brought home during a Roundtable discussion during Cutter Consortium's recent Summit conference.

Last week I attended Cutter Consortium's 2006 Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. As always, it was an interesting collection of people and presentations, which combined to create a thought- provoking atmosphere. The format of the Summit is unique, at least in my experience with IT conferences. Each topic is covered in a keynote presentation, which is followed by a panel of experts who discuss and debate the keynote and topic.

Successful projects have several common characteristics, including an active sponsor, engaged users, and an effective project manager. (Some projects might have these and still fail for other reasons, but I have never seen a successful IT project that didn't have these characteristics.) The most challenging criterion to fulfill is a sponsor -- and this is where many content management system (CMS) projects create the conditions for failure.

What is "best practice" for an engineering process? How good is your current set of development, maintenance, and service processes? How can we decide exactly which processes we are going to adopt in our organization, for example, in a CMMI implementation?

As the IT applications development business grows, the frequency of projects requiring multiple teams for their execution will also grow. In fact, with the added need for globalization affecting nearly every application, most, if not all, IT development projects will involve more than one team.

The recent revelation that the ultra-secret US National Security Administration (NSA) has amassed a gigantic database (some say it is the "biggest database in the world") covering "every call made in the USA" raises several privacy issues that are pertinent both to government and to industry.

How much do senior (nontechnology) executives know about IT? Not much, I would argue, and here's the worst part: they seem to know less and less over time. In fact, I believe that senior executives know less about IT today than they did 20 years ago.

In Part 1 of this Advisor (see "Organizational IT Asset Management Framework, Part 1," 4 May 2006), we wrote about the operational risk management framework for IT asset management (ITAM), which consists of a policy, standards, and processes. We conclude our discussion in this Advisor.

In the first in this series of Advisors (see "LoTech -- HiFi: The Evolution of Story Cards and User Stories," 23 March 2006), I stated that capturing stories in a malleable form is paramount to building a strong product backlog. I also discussed the use of a story wall as a simple way to see the project, along with various tools that can be used for organizing and tracking/planning with stories.