Cutter Fellow Jim Highsmith (of agile development fame) and I have been friends and colleagues since the 1980s. Though our careers have gone in different directions recently, our interests have begun to converge again around his passion for agile development and my passion for project architecture.

The other day, I was chatting with Cutter Fellow Ken Orr, who asked a very good question: "If object and component reuse didn't work, why is service reuse going to be any different?" Since service reuse is key to getting the value out of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), this is an important issue.

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

Last February, I discussed what I consider one of the most important developments in business process management (BPM): the ability to monitor the efficiency of distributed business processes in near real time (see the 23 February 2005 EA Advisor, " Monitoring Business Processes in Real Time").

A Cutter Consortium risk management survey explored in detail organizations' risk management practices. The participants included 180 IT managers involved in various IT positions. The survey included more than 50 risk management-related questions [1].