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?

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.