At last Windows Vista (the operating system formerly known as Longhorn) has reached beta, and Microsoft is confident that the client version will enter production by the end of 2006. However, the server (which for some reason is still called Longhorn) will not be generally available until 2007.

Last week, Oracle introduced Oracle BI Suite. This offering -- or rather, line of different offerings -- is significant because it blends Oracle's own BI technology (e.g., Oracle Discover, Oracle Reports, OLAP) with Siebel's BI and analytics technology, which Oracle gained when it acquired Siebel Systems last year.

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.

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.

Anyone running a complex business requires regular information about key operational, sales, and financial matters. A CEO we know remarked, "If you don't have the right data, how can you manage the place?" Otherwise, you're relying on luck and momentum.

Those who have been involved in litigious disputes over failed computer software projects and/or contracts readily agree that, whatever their size in terms of the financial amounts at stake, whatever the facts and circumstances of the contract between the parties, and whatever the conduct of the software development project, software construction and implementation cases present complex, interwoven technical and legal issues -- and therefore prove very costly and time consuming to unravel.

Last month, I covered the "blending" of business rules management (BRM) and business process management (BPM) technologies (see "Business Rules and Business Process Management: Separate But Complementary," 22 February 2006). This month, I want to discuss the use of BRM applications for multichannel decision automation.

Any doubt about where the market for business intelligence (BI) and data management is heading was shattered by IBM's recent announcement that it is launching a company-wide initiative that will invest US $1 billion over the next three years to expand its information management software and services offerings.

Over the past year, I've noticed increasing attention being directed at the use of text mining to enhance customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management (KM), enterprise information portals (EIP), and other applications by automating the analysis, categorization, indexing, summarization, and association of high volumes of text-based information.

Senior managers -- the people who make strategic product decisions -- need to know when they can expect those products to release. The organization of current product releases against a timeline is a project portfolio. And, planning the project portfolio in an agile environment is different -- but not harder -- than planning the project portfolio in a non-agile environment.

"Omigod, what happened to you?" asked my friend Jenny when we saw each other after dropping off our 4th-graders at school this week. My shoulder was heavily bound with a most impressive arm sling. It was throbbing like crazy, but the attention that my fancy sling garners me everywhere in town is almost worth it.

The concept of an independent organizational risk office has an amazing appeal. If we just open a risk office, they'll be able to channel the practice in the proper direction and get everyone on board. The allure of consistency, common understanding, and professional vision is almost too tempting to resist. This is a call to resist it.

GM's recent decision to initiate a "multisourcing" strategy that will result in it parceling out its IT outsourcing responsibilities to multiple solution providers has gained a lot of attention within the IT industry, as well as among corporate management and business publications.

Maybe I've been in the IT industry too long, but I don't get what all the commotion is about.

Some people compare opinions to body parts; everybody has them. Perhaps the same could be said about capability maturity models (CMM), which seem to have sprung up like weeds. Maturity models were first pioneered by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI, a federally funded research organization associated with Carnegie Mellon University) in the early 1990s as a way to quantify software engineering practices and provide comparisons among organizations.

Due diligence is the formal term for the process by which we screen and select options. Due diligence is organized around a set of constant criteria that can be applied to technology investment decisions of all kinds. The lenses used to vet investment opportunities and challenges are organized around the specific requirements that CIOs, venture capitalists (VCs), and technology vendors need to satisfy to achieve their objectives.

There are two components to post-project evaluations that focus on two related areas: how well the project was executed and what was the business impact it created. This second Advisor in a series of three articles on post-project evaluations takes a closer look at the first area, assessing project performance.

Henry Ford may have given us the inexpensive automobile but Alfred Sloan gave us the model year. Ford believed that mass production was based on making millions of one standardized product. Sloan, on the other hand, believed that mass consumerism was based on changing automobile styles every year so that people would be tempted (encouraged) to buy a new car every few years rather than every decade. This was called style-based (or marketing-based) obsolescence.

Recently, the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) revealed that its database containing approximately 325,000 names of alleged international terrorist suspects (or people suspected of helping them) is actually inflated by about 135,000 extra names. This revelation serves to highlight a problem that many organizations of all sizes and focus struggle to deal with: duplicate customer names and records.

In my last Trends Advisor ("Real Enterprise Data Architecture, Part 1," 23 February 2006), I touched on the issue of enterprise data architecture from a conceptual standpoint. I suggested that being an enterprise data architect (as opposed to a DBA or data modeler) demands that you take a very high-level view of the company.

Information security risk assessments have become one of the more important techniques to minimize operational risk, improve the security posture in a company, and meet current regulations and standards. Risk assessments have long been used in other domains, such as software and system development and the financial and insurance industries. In information security, risk assessments began as primarily technological evaluations -- an identification of the known [1] vulnerabilities remaining in operational systems and system components.

Scrum is probably the most popular agile method right now in the USA. The power of Scrum is its simplicity. There are only a handful of Scrum rules and so it is easy to get a team started with Scrum [1]. And yet Scrum can unleash the potential of a team and dramatically improve its productivity within weeks. A Scrum team works on one project at a time and Scrum provides a toolkit to cut through complexity so that everyone can focus on doing their job rather than fending off multiple drains on their time.

There are many key moments in projects. What I do during those moments greatly influences the outcome of the project. There is good news here in that we as project managers can learn to recognize these moments and respond well.

I believe a key moment in a project occurs when someone brings me some not-so-good news about the work. This can happen many times in every project. There is a set of activities preceding such a moment:

After performing rigorous due diligence, reviewing several RFP (request for proposal) responses, and evaluating a selected number of suitable vendors, you picked one or more partner(s) to work on your sourcing initiatives. What makes you so confident that you and your partner will have a successful relationship? What assures you that you two are really in this relationship together, for the long haul?