Yes! Of course! EA metrics really do matter.

I supervise people. Many of you reading this also supervise people. I have observed that what I say as a supervisor often means much to someone who works for me. Most of the time, however, I don't realize that my statements mean anything to anyone.

Last week, Oracle finally beat out SAP AG in its battle to acquire retail applications vendor Retek Inc. for approximately US $630 million. Oracle had been trying to acquire Retek since earlier this year but was initially distracted by its long, drawn-out efforts to buy PeopleSoft. Then, SAP decided to make a play for Retek.

A software portfolio is a collection of IT projects, both proposed and in progress, as well as the deployed systems within your organization. Your IT portfolio should be a diversified mix of high-risk/high-reward and low-risk/low-reward elements, just like your personal investment portfolio, all leading to the creation of systems that support a strategic business goal.

For many practitioners, establishing collaboration means weakening corporate IT security. Yet as we all know, nobody in the business or IT community will agree to compromise security for anything. So the questions become:

How do we have both collaboration and security?

Since the recent Cutter IT Journal issue on outsourcing (" Offshore Outsourcing: No Pain, No Gain?" Vol. 17, No. 10, October 2004), there has been a steady stream of articles on outsourcing, an indicator that this topic is very much on our minds.

During the first 15 years of its life, most Scrum implementations have been bottom-up. A project team would try Scrum and the results would be impressive. Another customer or another team would try it. Pretty soon, Scrum was used throughout the organization.

Can a set of universal principles, beliefs, and attitudes be distilled and then successfully applied throughout the IT function in an organization? My belief is that, increasingly, it cannot. The IT function and its components are becoming less and less homogenous. The behavior and culture desirable in one IT setting can be irrelevant or even detrimental in another.

Nelson, the project manager, called me the other day. He expressed his astonishment at his team's reaction to a decision he had made. "I've watched other teams get so much done by adopting practices of sustainable pace and better communication flows. I thought my team would benefit by it too.

The idea of retaining core competency activities inhouse and outsourcing the rest is a perfect example of Industrial Age thinking. It belies a conviction that the core of your business today will be the core tomorrow, that today's skills and resources will be enough to take you through the foreseeable future.

During the dot-com craze, it seemed like Web analytics vendors were popping up like weeds. Many of the leading BI vendors at the time quickly moved to jump on the Web analytics bandwagon as well by introducing products designed to support everything from click-stream analysis and online campaign optimization to Web site visitor segmentation and conversion analysis.