Managing risk is one of the keys to success in an outsourcing arrangement, and companies use many control mechanisms to manage risk in outsourcing deals. These control mechanisms can range from full-scale contract offices, project management offices, metrics, scorecard reporting, audits, CMMI assessments, and onsite oversight teams, or any combination of these.

Anyone who is around me very long will hear about one of my favorite books: Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn . I reference the book in my design and architecture classes as a way to focus on what people do with the things we build.

There's a lot of interest in business process improvement at the moment, and much of it is focused on the hope that software tools can be used to organize and control the execution of business processes. Products designed to facilitate the analysis and runtime management of processes are typically called business process management (BPM) tools or suites.

Portfolio management is the set of processes and techniques that allow an enterprise to define and manage its portfolio of applications, assets, and projects. Simplifying, the difference between IT portfolio management, EA, and IT management can be characterized as follows:

It is expected that the scope of an outsourcing relationship will evolve over the lifetime of the contract. Good scope management benefits both the buyer and the provider: the buyer receives all the services at the appropriate service level that it contracted for without overpaying, and the service provider performs only the services it has been contracted to do without giving away work.

Have you ever encountered a project failure? Project management research suggests that many projects would qualify as failures. Most statistics clearly imply that things are not getting any better and failures are commonplace.

Offshore IT outsourcing started with Y2K and applications software work and has expanded in the last few years to include business processes like HR and accounting and IT-enabled services, such as contact centers and related customer support services.

IBM announced it's buying Alphablox Corporation for an undisclosed amount. Alphablox's namesake product is a component-based Java application development environment (ADE) that is particularly useful for developing and embedding analytic functionality within other software applications.

[Excerpted from an article in the September 1992 Cutter IT Journal (formerly American Programmer).]

Few software risk management approaches attempt to handle both software-intensive systems-related process and product risks, and almost none assesses the primary reasons for utilizing software-intensive systems in the first place, as this is perceived to be "outside the scope" of software project managers.

Last week I had a one-on-one meeting with the CIO of one of my clients, a major financial services firm. During our conversation, Ron asked for advice about transforming his organization. By this time, I'd been working with Ron's team for about six months, and the team had made remarkable progress.

I remember when "platform" meant hardware, and later "hardware and an operating system." Today, the term is used in a variety of ways, but it always seems to suggest the platform on which key applications will sit or the environment the applications will depend on as they are executed.