There are two positions held by the supporters and the opponents in the offshoring debate. Generally, supporters of offshoring cite a persuasive list of global business-related advantages that result from offshore outsourcing. Most of the opponents concentrate mainly on the loss of jobs and the loss of technological advantage in the outsourcing country. We will discuss some of the main arguments from each side of the debate.

We began our discussion of the language of money in the first part of this Advisor series (see " The Nimble Project Manager and the Language of Money, Part 1," 1 December 2005). This Advisor recommends ways an agile project manager can best use the language of money.

Here are some holiday gift ideas that dovetail pretty nicely with the trends we're seeing in our business.

10. Let's give Larry Ellison another appearance on Oprah to reprise his "network computer" sales pitch -- the one that fell flat way back when but would fly today. We all know that it's only a matter of time before thin clients rule.

In late November, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown stunned the UK business community by unexpectedly announcing that the long-awaited public company reporting requirement called the Operating Financial Review (OFR) was being abolished. The OFR, scheduled to go into affect in April 2006 after already being postponed a year, was meant to provide shareholders clear, comprehensive, and complete information on the operations and thinking inside UK public companies.

Can the corporate IT R&D function be recast to take on the larger responsibility for business-IT innovation? Although IT R&D as we know it is a useful function, on its own it is unlikely to make much of a business impact, or even to survive until the next business cycle. Consider the following limitations of traditional IT R&D in the context of business-IT innovation:

One area that many EA programs struggle with is demonstrating the value that they bring to an enterprise. A useful way to address this challenge is to think of EA as a service organization; i.e., as providing a service to the enterprise and, in particular, to specific user groups (customers) within the enterprise. To start with this approach, we first identify who the customers are and what service is provided to them.

"Given the appeals court's affirmation of Microsoft's infringement and the favorable resolution of the reexamination, we look forward to quickly dispatching the remaining issues before the district court so that the university and Eolas can be fairly compensated for the use of their property right."

NCR's Teradata data warehousing division has acquired packaged financial performance data warehouse vendor DecisionPoint Software for an undisclosed amount. Teradata plans to integrate DecisionPoint's data warehousing and financial performance management (FPM) technology with the Teradata enterprise data warehouse offering.

The world is far too complicated for humans to get things perfectly right the first time, but humans have a great capacity to tune in, to perfect through feedback, and then to make an adjustment.

One of my favorite writers is Christopher Alexander. Alexander is a maverick architect who has spent the better part of his career criticizing mainstream architecture for concentrating on visually different but sterile buildings and environments. Alexander is a darling of the software community because of his work on "pattern languages."

Failure to protect stakeholder interests with respect to certain categories of information or failure to prevent unauthorized access to personal information may have serious legal consequences. An enterprise-wide approach to security governance can help an organization maintain compliance with new and expanding laws and regulations and avoid legal liability related to statutory or common law.

 

Web services are nowadays emerging as a major technology for deploying automated interactions between distributed and heterogeneous applications. Various standards support this deployment, including WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP. These standards respectively support the definition of Web services, their advertisement to the community of users, and finally their binding for invocation purposes. In general, composing Web services rather than accessing a single Web service is essential and provides better benefits to users.

There are no guarantees for winning any case, but consider using the following maxims for systems development/implementation projects to help you increase your chances of project or courtroom success.

In order to SUCCEED:

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

SAP AG has acquired enterprise information integration (EII) vendor Callixa for an undisclosed amount. SAP plans to use Callixa software to supplement the data integration capabilities of its enterprise software offerings.

Most managers' first response, on being asked to secure their corporate networks, would probably be to install a firewall and force all incoming and outgoing traffic to pass through it. (Antivirus packages for all computers might come a close second these days.) Networks are becoming so complex and dynamic, however, that there are growing doubts as to whether perimeter defense can be trusted at all.

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.

Nearly two-thirds of the world's Web sites run on the Apache HTTP Server. The wildly successful Apache server was not the brainchild of a big software powerhouse such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft. Apache came into being because a group of individuals cared deeply about developing really great technology. Apache tells the inspiring story of the HTTP Server's development on its Web Site (see www.apache.org):