A Google search of the phrase "achieve an ROI of" returns a sea of URLS from IT vendors promising that an investment in their product means a return on investment. As organizations grew more conscious of the need to fold the language of finance and profit into IT investment assessment, it was predictable that vendors would adopt the language of economic value into their sales and marketing efforts. Are these claims more than rhetoric?

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?

I've seen a lot of press lately about the relationship between business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Products are now claiming to support the "convergence of BPM and SOA technologies." There have been major announcements this year of BPM products being acquired by SOA vendors, such as the purchase of Collaxa by Oracle and the recent purchase of Fuego by BEA. There have also been announcements of new product sets following previous acquisitions.

Over the years, I've had the pleasure of working in a range of IT organizations around the world, and I've often worked with, or at least reviewed, many of the enterprise architecture (EA) teams within those organizations. In all cases, the EA team is staffed with some of the best and brightest within IT, all of whom have the organization's best interests at heart.

The latest announcement by open source reporting tools vendor JasperSoft that it has a new business intelligence (BI) server designed to make it easier for corporate and commercial software developers to build reporting environments got me thinking the other day about the extent to which organizations are actually embracing open source BI tools.

The management of knowledge is not new. Knowledge has been managed in organizations from time immemorial to ascertain that appropriate capabilities are available for people to perform requisite work competently and successfully. As a result, implicit knowledge management (KM) mechanisms were pursued by introducing practices such as master-apprentice traditions, educational programs, and so on.

Former Intel Chairman Andy Grove nicely described the link between strategic and operational risk, and the importance of managing the former by the latter, when he said, "People [employees] formulate strategy with their fingertips. Day in and day out they respond to things by virtue of the products they produce, the price concessions they make, the distribution channels they choose."

Typical database development involves building the data structures, writing some code to access the database, running the code, then writing some queries to verify that the data got into the database. Even the most rigorous database testers generally verify a database by running several queries and visually inspecting the results for validity. The problem with this approach is that as changes are made to the database, we don't generally rerun all the old test queries to revalidate that everything is still fine.

Vendor readiness for a security and privacy regime which meets the offshoring company's needs is a key vendor selection criteria as well as an operational imperative at the time the relationship with an offshore service provider is forged. As part of a comprehensive due diligence process on the cusp of signing a services contract, many organizations require a vendor to submit a security self-assessment.

I was talking recently with a reader who is in the process of selecting a business rules management (BRM) tool for a project at her company. She has checked out various products on the market, and is still unsure as to which one to choose. In particular, she is agonizing over the various user interface paradigms that the different products utilize.

One of our clients regularly provides every business unit management team with a comprehensive portfolio management report and dashboard covering the entire IT spend, every month. This report and dashboard covers several global business units and many subsidiary units. The report and dashboard highlight important areas of concern: IT spend not aligned with strategy, IT spend that performed badly (e.g., service-level and quality), IT spend with significant business and technical risk.

The press regularly echoes the never-ending frustration of business and project managers with large overruns, huge delays, and low-quality delivery of software projects. Software estimation remains a vexing conundrum. If a civil engineer can produce reliable estimates for a new bridge, why can't software engineers produce reliable estimates for software projects?

Every so often, you may come across an article that says something to the effect that "CRM isn't a product or technology but rather an attitude or mind set." Well, I've been thinking a lot about this concept lately and have come to the conclusion that done correctly, CRM is indeed both a particular mindset and a technology. Here's an example that I hope demonstrates why it is both.

A good friend of mine, who was quite active in the AI community in the late 1980s and early 1990s, asked me an interesting question the other day: "When did rule-based systems go from being 'expert systems' to 'business rules management systems'?"

Recently, my colleagues on the Cutter Business Technology Council got into a very heated exchange on the state-of-the-art in software development. A couple of members of the Council were particularly disturbed by the level of knowledge in fundamental principles that some of their recent computer science graduates were exhibiting.

"The entrepreneur," said the early 19th century French economist J. B. Say, "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield."

For any company, moving from a successful product line that may be getting old in the teeth to a newer one is always fraught with difficulty. How difficult do you think it is to fundamentally change the nature of your business?

In Part 1 (see "Agile Project Leadership Circa 1899, Part 1," 30 March) we saw how Wilbur and Orville Wright demonstrated three of the six principles of the modern-day Declaration of Interdependence for agile project leadership (www.pmdoi.org) by tackling the largest uncertainty first (the control system), by approaching the problem in annual iterations culminating each year with fulfillment tests at Kitty Hawk, and by selecting

Our December 2005 survey on outsourcing business intelligence (BI) showed that the pricing model is the third most important factor when selecting a provider (following experience and cost). All pricing models are essentially based on the number of units of service provided multiplied by a rate per unit. Outsourcing contracts layer service level and performance criteria over this units-times-rate basis.

I've been talking to a lot of clients that want to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Many have been playing around with different implementations and they proudly show me the couple of services they have implemented and say, "What do you think of our SOA?" I usually answer with something along the lines of, "That's a good start," or "This looks like a useful service," or segue into some line of questioning about what they did and what they learned.

Some of the most instructive examples of the future of IT taking shape have, in recent years, been in the pharmaceuticals industry. Companies in this industry have long understood the importance of revenue-side IT investments. Many firms have invested billions in what is sometimes called "industrialized drug research."

It may seem difficult to understand how spammers think and act. Nevertheless, based on the "principles" of the act of spamming, we can identify three basic actions of a spammer:

Boards of directors have a lot of committees: compensation committees, audit committees, M&A committees, among others. But what about IT? Are there committees that focus squarely on the acquisition, deployment, and support of IT? Most companies do not segment IT as a unique activity. Perhaps this means that they see technology as more tactical than strategic. Perhaps they don't have enough expertise to actually staff a technology committee.

Business Objects has thrown its hat into the software-as-a-service space with the announcement of crystalreports.com. Crystalreports.com is an on-demand report sharing platform for organizations using Crystal Reports. Basically, it provides a common location for users to upload reports and then specify who can access them.

Most IT organizations are cost -- not profit -- centers. Senior executives (except for the CIO and CTO, of course) are always trying to reduce technology expenses. A friend of mine -- a CIO at a major insurance company -- gets a memorandum every quarter from the CEO asking him to reduce technology expenses by 10%. He keeps telling him that if he were able to reduce technology spending by 10% -- quarter after quarter -- eventually technology would be free. This silly dance has been going on for years.