Test-driven development was developed by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Kent Beck, one of the founding fathers of Extreme Programming (XP). Beck is also the inventor of the xUnit family of automated unit testing utilities and author of Test-Driven Development: By Example [1], which highlights both TDD and JUnit.

The year 2005 was an interesting one from an enterprise risk management and governance (ERM&G) perspective. Before we launch into 2006, let's take a quick look back at some of the subjects of last year's ERM&G Advisors.

So where are we now?

An information system (IS) manager's job can be more than delivering data. Moving up the management chain to chief information officer (CIO) requires a more critical understanding of how and why data is collected and used by decision makers.

I began my first EA Advisor in 2005 with some predictions of what the year would bring (see " Looking Ahead to 2005," 19 January 2005). To kick off 2006, I'm going to see how those predictions panned out. And not to be accused of learning my lesson, I'm going to make some more predictions for 2006. Here we go....

Happy New Year!

I wish all of my readers a terrific 2006.

Since this is the first Advisor of the New Year, I thought I'd give my thoughts on some of the more important business intelligence (BI) developments and trends I see taking place in 2006. Obviously, I can't cover everything here, so I welcome your feedback on developments you see affecting data warehousing, BI, and CRM this year.

"Not for the faint of heart" should read the tagline on virtually all open source software (except, perhaps, that provided by MySQL, JBoss, and other "business-focused" stalwarts). OSS has been created by developers and is designed to be consumed by developers. As such, there is very little in the way of true adoption models, reliable knowledge acquisition mechanisms, or organizational impact guidance.

There are at least 12 major behavioral indicators that an organization's leadership can use to determine whether it is creating an effective enterprise risk management (ERM) organizational culture.

How significant is the offshoring question? Is the intensity of the debate that it has sparked justified (or, in zoological terms, is the elephant really that big)? And is the controversy, as some people seem to believe, mainly a US issue? The topic has certainly drawn a great deal of interest from some prominent participants, including not only the IEEE but also the US Congress and the United Nations.

As if our current buzzwords had already run their course, or we didn't have enough to last us, a new buzzword has hit the enterprise architecture and application scene. "Applistructure" describes the latest trend to combine enterprise business applications with enterprise infrastructure.

The Cutter Business Technology Council points out that organizations typically change their business focus (and hence their core competencies) over time [1]. The problem is that many decisions to outsource business processes (or parts of those processes) are often made with little thought to what is actually meant by core competency in the context of a particular organization.

Ask any IT professional what phrases spring to mind when you mention "organizational politics," and nine times out of 10 you will get responses such as: Doing deals Scoring points Personal agendas Getting one over on one's colleagues Secrecy and subterfuge Mafia tactics Win-lose

Organizational politics are, however, a fact of corporate life. Organizations, being made up of people, are essentially political institutions.

Last week's service interruption at on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) provider Salesforce.com illustrates the risk that companies assume when they choose to outsource their CRM applications; that hosted applications have all the downtime and security risks of remotely located and managed systems.

There is a great deal of advice available on strategies for implementing new technology and for new methodologies for project management, but effective advice is relatively rare for those many sites with stranded investments in legacy IT systems and their respective support organizations. We see some or all of the following issues again and again in organizations caught in a stranded investment cost trap:

Aging software and hardware with excessive maintenance costs

In a recent Newsweek article about Google (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10296177/site/newsweek/), Eric Schmidt outlined Google's Ten Golden Rules for getting the most out of knowledge workers. Since agile development is really more about mindset and philosophy than specific practices, I found it interesting to analyze Google's rules from an agile perspective.

The service component architecture (SCA) is a new specification created by a group of enterprise software vendors that includes IBM, BEA Systems, Oracle, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Sybase, and Iona Technologies. Although still under development, SCA holds the promise of simplifying application development within the service-oriented architecture (SOA) model.

  What If Your CRM Strategy Were a Mirage? Part 1: The Inherent Limitations of CRM

I was recently working on a major piece of literature, hoping to sell it before the Christmas bills arrive. In the course of my research, I accidentally discovered a peculiarity that annoyed, amused, and inspired me.

In an article "Rankings of Full Time Occupations, By Earnings, 2000" [1], I found several things I didn't expect. The first is stunning: positions 3 through 12 are teachers! They are, in this order: Economics, Physics, Medicine, Law, Natural Sciences, Engineering, Phys Ed, Sociology, Education, and History.