Since not all sourcing projects are the same, what we should look for in a sourcing partner isn't always going to be the same. However, there is a consistent way to evaluate and analyze potential partners. Apart from their technical strengths and weaknesses, there are nine factors we must consider while evaluating potential vendors:

Flexibility or agility -- How does the vendor's business model lend itself to meeting our sourcing goals and objectives?

We believe the management and governance of IT ultimately comes down to the management of money. Project and lights-on budget decisions essentially determine what will be done with IT. However, traditional accounting-based budgets do not support the kind of decision-making necessary. Portfolio-based budgets -- and the management decisions and governance associated with them -- directly support the kind of decision-making necessary.

Recently, I had the privilege of being a guest keynote speaker at symposiums for two of the world's largest financial services companies, where I spoke about the people dynamics and success/failure trends of deadline-intensive projects -- something near and dear to all our hearts. Between the two events (one held in Chicago and the other in Boston), there were about 700 technology professionals in the audiences. It was an exciting time.

25 January 2006

The first week out of college in my first job people told me, "No surprises on your projects." I had no idea what that meant and struggled with this concept of surprises on projects for years. I eventually learned what people were trying to express and a few techniques that helped with warnings about bad news.

Knowledge and innovation will not happen where there is no trust. Companies that create an environment of trust with strong social connections and knowledge sharing are finding such a culture to be a source of real competitive advantage.

If you're like me, you have the best of intentions around the new year but somehow never get around to coming up with meaningful resolutions. As a special service to Enterprise Architecture Advisor readers, we're providing a list of ready-made resolutions that you can adopt for 2006 or beyond.

Enterprise reporting tools vendor Actuate Corporation has acquired business performance management vendor Performancesoft, Inc. for an initial US $16.5 million. Actuate will also pay -- in 2007 -- an additional contingent cash payment of up to $13.5 million based on achievement of certain revenue and operating margin targets for 2006.

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.

Amidst the tangle and bustle of ERP, CRM, NAS, SAN, CAS, and NSF, I have found a new acronym right down the block from where HSM used to live (I grew up with DFHSM; we don't talk about the DF part). ILM 's the name of the new acronym. Pronounced eye-el-em, not "ilm" (perish the thought): information lifecycle management.

I recently sat through a 32-slide PowerPoint presentation (about 14 slides too many) on a vendor's view of ILM. I'll save you the time by giving you the quick version.

The first step toward successful outsourcing is identifying the type of outsourcing model that best fits the organization's objectives. Most enterprises fail to recognize this, or at best, tend to take a one-size-fits-all approach. As a result, many of these engagements begin with mismatched management expectations and a relatively high risk of failure.

In last week's Advisor, I said that outside of academia, the life sciences, and financial services, practical grid business applications are mostly rare, and that the biggest reason for this is a lack of standards and best practices for implementation. I added that although these are now under development, I did not see companies stampeding to implement grid-computing architectures in 2006 (see " My Thoughts on BI Trends for 2006," 3 January 2006).

Everyone wants new management offices. It seems that a preferred response to management problems of many kinds is to create a new office responsible for something fairly specific. The ones that come immediately to mind are project management offices (PMOs), process management offices (PMOs again -- causing, of course, some confusion among the acronym crowd), and vendor management offices (VMOs). What are these offices, and who are these people? And why are there so many of them?