"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.

There are individuals afraid to begin the risk conversation in any organization. Why? I hear it from our client personnel time and again. "We're risk averse around here. Management doesn't want to admit there are risks. They tell me to come with solutions, not problems, and then they tell me that I should have warned them about the risks." These are not uncommon complaints and concerns. What's tragic about them is that they stifle the risk conversation in an organization.

This is the third in a series of E-Mail Advisors on agile integration and the second to deal with organizing (see "Agile Integration -- Making Agile Work in Organizations," 2 March 2006, and "Agile Integration -- Organization and Empowered Teams," 6 April 2006). The six organizing guidelines presented previously are:

Historically, managers in large private and public enterprises like to consider (and portray) themselves as hard-headed businesspeople -- no frills, straight to the point. For most of the history of IT, this line of thinking has dominated. However, the Web changed that. Success on the Web has caused many organizations to rethink how they use technology, especially how they can reach people who are not technology-oriented. The emergence of the creative class has given one more reason that organizations need to look at their information systems.

A successful business intelligence (BI) outsourcing strategy requires a clear understanding of the value proposition. A benefits analysis to assess the gains of outsourcing should include the value of coming "online" more quickly with a new BI application; the cost saved by not having to build and maintain inhouse BI expertise; and the value inherent in the vendors' experience and ability to avoid perils and pitfalls.

Information architectures are increasingly misaligned with business architectures while becoming less adaptive to new products, services, markets, and customer requirements. A steady drumbeat of failed projects, some that are publicized and some that are not, has executives rethinking failed policies of the past. Wholesale replacement projects and package deployment initiatives have poor track records while integration tools have created a maze of redundancies wrapped around already convoluted architectures.

In my previous Advisor (see "The Mythical Business Case -- Part 1: The Limits of Rational Decisions," 8 March 2006), I presented the not-so-uncommon phenomenon of tweaking formal business case analysis to fit (rather than prove) the IT investment decisions that have already been made.

Reputation is a major corporate asset that is often valued much more than the tangible assets of the corporation itself. Buying a corporation's reputation is as important a consideration as buying its assets. When Phillip Morris bought Kraft Foods for US $13.1 billion, it wanted Kraft's reputation and was willing to pay four times Kraft's physical assets to get it.

Last week, Microsoft acquired BI analysis and visualization vendor ProClarity Corporation. Financial terms were not revealed. However, this deal is important because it significantly bolsters Microsoft's already considerable BI technology stack with an intuitive and comprehensive analytic, visualization, and reporting platform already tailor-made for the Microsoft product line.

One critical issue that arises in the move to agile methods is organization. Since some of these issues differ between product organizations (such as software ISVs) and IT organizations, I will discuss some general guidelines and then how they apply to each type of organization. This first Advisor on agile organizations will focus on the first guideline (of the six outlined below) of empowered customer-facing teams.

"The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either." This quote from Ben Franklin came to mind as I sat bemused while trying to outwardly show some sympathy to my government colleague as he attempted to log on to his agency's network. Some 30-plus minutes later, he was able to log in. Next came the process of asking the network for permission to start checking for his e-mail. This is always an adventure as well, since this activity might take another 30 minutes to complete.

My last three Trends Advisors in this series (see "Real Enterprise Data Architecture, Parts 1, 2, and 3," 23 February, 9 March, and 30 March 2006) have been about enterprise data architecture.

What is "architecture?" We know what conventional architecture is in the context of the structure of buildings. So, the question is, what is systems architecture in the systems engineering context?

There are many different opinions and many standard definitions.

All around the world, corporations are turning to open source software (OSS) for a number of compelling reasons. In Europe, for instance, financial services companies have been moving to Linux because of its superior price/performance, hardware-neutrality, reliability, and vendor independence. Companies like AtosEuronext, Banco Popolare di Milano, LVM Insurance, and Reuters Group have migrated important server-side operations to Linux with remarkably successful results.

This third and final Advisor in a series of articles on post-project evaluations focuses on the second of the two main components of post-project evaluations: assessing the business impact of an IT investment (see "Post-Project Evaluations, Part 1: Overview," 22 February 2006 and "Post-Project Evaluations, Part 2: Assessing Project Performance," 15 March 2006).

Technology and business conditions are creating an environment that favors rapid response, collaboration, and loosely knit modular organization. This trend can be seen at all levels, from the supply of individual contract labor up to "constellations" of enterprises brought together for a common purpose.

Sadly, I believe that the data management (DM) community has fallen down when it comes to ensuring data quality within the vast majority of organizations. Yes, these people talk the talk, but they don't seem to walk it. They claim that data quality is important, and they're right about that. They also claim that they should be responsible for ensuring data quality, which also seems fair. But, as we can see by the myriad data challenges faced within most organizations, their vision begins to fail.