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.

In July 2005, we conducted a survey that asked 111 end-user organizations (of various sizes based worldwide) about their efforts to consolidate and standardize their BI tools platforms (query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards, etc.). Findings from this survey help to shed some light on current BI tools usage trends as well as the status of corporate BI tools standardization efforts.