Mobile computing and communications technologies are making rapid advances and are gaining widespread adoption worldwide. They are weaving into the fabric of our everyday life and work and beginning to transform them in ways that were impossible a few years ago. It seems that we are heading for a new paradigm that might be called a mobile revolution.

Myth: "We can agree on a contract now, and then agree on how to measure it later."

Reality: Not in your wildest dreams!

I've often wondered about the split between new development, enhancement, and maintenance in an agile development world. While there are differences between software product companies and IT organizations in how they handle these types of development, the common theme is dividing the organization to handle different categories of development.

My friend Bob Courtney used to say that in risk management there were two kinds of risks that people had trouble dealing with: those that happened several thousand times a day and cost a few cents or a few dollars, and those that happened once every couple hundred years and cost millions (or billions) of dollars.

A business unit (about US $700M in revenue) within my company was strategically trying to align its staff and infrastructure resources into a highly variable model. It was encountering significant peaks and valleys in demand, both from an infrastructure and a software development perspective. It wanted the most cost-effective model, reducing operational baseline costs as much as possible.

No doubt about it, you've got to hand it to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: the most important event to take place concerning the enterprise software market since Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft is Oracle's new move to buy Siebel Systems for US $5.9 billion. Siebel is the CRM market leader. Thus, with this single acquisition, Oracle becomes the number-one CRM vendor.

Just a few years ago, everyone used the phrase "killer app." The reference, of course, was to new technologies that would revolutionize some process or activity; some technology solution that would excite venture capitalists, Wall Street analysts, vendors, and customers. Most of the killer apps back then were Internet-focused. But since 2000, not too many people use the phrase.

Although mobile technology is still young and has limitations, it continues to create novel applications and new business models, "mobilizing" and refining business processes. Mobile computing is attracting a lot of interest as stakeholders come to realize its value, and it is empowering us in myriad ways. Quietly, the mobile revolution has begun!

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become one of the top priorities of IT organizations and application providers. By applying SOA, IT organizations intend to reuse technology, processes, and people. However, as SOA becomes prevailing software engineering practice, not enough has been done to adopt SOA concepts into the infrastructure domain.

Agile software development and agile project management (APM) practices have started to take root in several US companies, and many of these same companies have begun outsourcing software development to offshore companies. Because the agile process requires a very high level of communication and interaction among team members, it calls for all trained team members to be colocated.