Building a business case is a necessary prerequisite in supporting any major investment decision. Building the business model, calculating costs and quantifying benefits, analyzing cash flow over time, and calculating financial indicators, such as net present value, internal rate of return, return on investment (ROI), or whatever else is required for getting the management approval, are essential parts of "investment engineering." This is the kind of discipline that creates informed and responsible spending decisions, right?

Vendors today are introducing new products that apply advanced algorithms designed specifically for e-mail analysis. The result is an emerging market: e-mail intelligence.

With larger organizations undertaking agile project management and development methods in significant ways, issues around what I've referred to as "agile integration" are becoming more and more important to successful agile implementation. Agile integration involves all the enterprise and organizational issues that must be addressed for agile practices and principles to become fully integrated into an organization's ways of doing business.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the XX Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. Being from the US state of New Hampshire, I had to root for our local competitor Bode Miller, who's from Franconia. At the Men's Combined event (downhill and slalom), he was in first place after the downhill portion of the race, clocking the fastest speed of the day at a blistering 126.8 Km/hr (79 MPH -- I don't even drive that fast). But in the slalom portion of the race, he missed a gate and was disqualified. This was to be the second of five disappointing appearances for Bode.

Our clients' business executives often ask us to tell them the appropriate level of IT spending compared to the company's total revenues. Some companies spend 2% of revenue, others spend 8% or 10% or even more. Of course, the industry in which the company operates affects this; probably financial services firms, for example, spend a higher proportion of revenue than, say, manufacturing firms. But maybe not.

If you spend serious money with a vendor, here are five things you should expect.

NCR Teradata announced it is buying supply chain analytics application vendor SeeCommerce for an undisclosed amount. Teradata will use SeeCommerce's packaged supply chain intelligence (SCI) applications to bolster its Teradata Demand and Supply Chain offerings.

SeeCommerce offers SeeChain -- a packaged SCI application, whose various modules cover a range of supply chain domains and processes, including:

There seems to be a mantra in many agile development organizations that the shorter the iteration, the more agile the team. While I believe strongly in short iterations (on the order of one to four weeks), sometimes the "shorter is better" mantra gets in the way of progress. It may also be a symptom of a process being too developer centric.

Here are some questions we need to ask about stakeholder value. How can we determine the overall value of a system? How is this value related to the performance characteristics of the system? How can we engineer the value to meet stakeholder expectations? How can we test and measure the real value? Can we contract for system payment by value, or do we have to restrict ourselves to payment for performance levels? Is there any way to quantify the overall value of a system as a function of a set of system attributes?

Although practitioners from both camps still tend to view them as separate -- yet complementary -- in truth, business rules management (BRM) and business process management (BPM) technologies are becoming more and more intertwined. This is due to the fact that BRM technology aligns very well with process optimization -- in particular, for automating repeatable decisions as part of some process or business activity.

Evaluating an IT project once it is completed is one of those activities that everyone recognizes as necessary but few organizations approach methodically. Post-project fatigue and pressures to redeploy resources make retrospection into what went right or wrong seem like an expendable activity. Yet organizational learning in the effective application and use of IT requires that IT projects be evaluated for their effectiveness as well as their contribution to business value.

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.

The firm, as we have known it, is dying. A new one is emerging. The firm, as we will come to know it, is embedded in the ontology of service-oriented architecture (SOA). We stand today in the murky waters between these two states, and as is often the case, confusion confounds things. As we learned in school, the old firm rose with the birth of industrialism, was strengthened with the structures of modernism, and came to maturity with computing. We have grown comfortable with this genesis. But now, something is afoot inside us.

In recent years, application developers have pioneered techniques that enable them to work in an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) manner, and now we're going one step further with agile methods that are also highly collaborative. Unfortunately, many data professionals are still mired in the traditional, serial approaches of the late 1970s and 1980s. As a result, they're discovering that they need to play catch-up if they're to remain relevant within the new environment.