The merging of business process management systems (BPMSs) and business rules management systems (BRMSs) represents an important trend in business process management. Why is this so? Because it is enabling companies to more easily define and manage processes designed to automate the complex tasks associated with frequently changing applications like decision support, fraud prevention, product recommendation, marketing, and compliance.

The question came up in the project management discussion group I run (www.newgrange.org) about how much responsibility a project manager (PM) has in making sure that a vendor is fairly compensated under the terms of a fixed-fee contract. Far be it from me to say a vendor can't enter a fixed-fee deal knowing they'll be taking a loss BUT once the contract is signed a certain attitude of fairness should prevail.

Recently, in preparing for a presentation, I was thinking about what makes agile project management and development successful. While there are many factors in agile's success, I think four key ones are:

One test to determine whether an organizational process has really taken root is to see whether the organization continues to follow the process in difficult times. Often when an organization is under budgetary or strong competitive pressure, process is the first thing to be chucked overboard. It is common, for instance, to find testing reduced on programs that are behind schedule and over cost.

In general, as has been observed since the turn of the millennium in India, the global BPO sector continues to grow in strength, with high levels of activity both onshore and offshore. Complementing this growth is the spurt of new suppliers coming to the table with highly complex services such as research or analytics. This trend is often termed "moving up the value chain" -- a dreadful cliche uttered far too often by commentators who forget that less complex services can also be of great value.

We often talk about enterprise architecture (EA) as having a primary objective of aligning IT systems with business strategy. But underlying this is the unstated but assumed clarification "over time, as things change." In other words, we expect EA to be as much about accommodating change as it is about aligning IT systems.

Back in October 2003, I reported that digital dashboards and scorecards were rapidly becoming among the most popular BI applications. This is because they help organizations better measure, communicate, and manage their business performance at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. In so doing, they assist end users in determining how well they are performing relative to established targets by providing a list of key metrics scored via visual indicators.

No matter what project lifecycle (or lack of lifecycle) your organization abides by, chances are you are missing an important phase -- the retrospective.

I am a member of a special task force on job migration for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Our task is to describe what's happening with outsourcing; my specific role is to recommend what our educational institutions should do in response to these trends. I am a member of the education subcommittee.

IT investments come into existence and deliver results through three primary sets of activities: innovation, implementation, and integration. All three have to be attended to for organizations to capitalize on the business potential of IT. Each set of activities represents a different perspective, complementary to the other two.

The outsourcing alliances that will succeed in today's economy are those with the best relationship management. While core competencies will differ from organization to organization, creating and maintaining trust and managing expectations must be core competencies for every organization.