Thousands of organisations (large and small) in every business sector around the world are achieving remarkable gains from well-managed reengineering and process change projects. Their secret? They have distilled the real "wisdom" of reengineering and applied it to their key business processes. This is business process management in action.

-- Business Process Management Journal [3]

In order to achieve truly agile, innovative organizations, a change in our approach to performance management systems is necessary. This Executive Report introduces a new measurement system, the adaptive performance management system (APMS).

Innovation

The application of wikis will increasingly infiltrate forward-thinking, mainstream enterprises in the form of applications that will save these companies money and enable them to collaborate, and therefore innovate, in new ways.

A large part of the IT community today seems to be busy applying the principles of service orientation in software product development efforts. What started as a specific programming technique and architectural principle later evolved into a philosophy of taming the complexity of enterprise IT by turning it into a heap of interchangeable, standardized "software LEGO bricks" and finally has become a fashionable concept used in IT marketing.

An understanding of the basic concepts of business rules and how a rule-based system (RBS) works is becoming essential knowledge as the impact of RBSs on our daily lives is continuously increasing.

In the last few years, all of us in the IT industry, and many of the general public, have come to accept free and open source software (F/OSS) as a fact of life. While some of its more esoteric aspects -- such as the precise distinction between free software and OSS or the enchanted world of F/OSS licensing -- are little understood, most of us could reel off half a dozen or so F/OSS packages.

Editor's note: All uncited remarks and quotations used in this report are from personal phone interviews with the author.

It should come as no surprise to anyone in the IT world that old concepts often reemerge under new, more mysterious sounding titles. Navigating the world of IT is like taking a trip through a bowl of alphabet soup. But while the names and terminology may change, the core concepts usually stay the same.

Agile methods (AM) and enterprise architecture (EA) are emerging disciplines1 for effectively planning and developing computing systems. Many books and papers are devoted to each, describing their principles, processes, artifacts, and pitfalls.