Struggling with the age-old challenge of too much demand and not enough time and resources to do it all? We all know what the solution is: focus on those things that yield the greatest value for your organization. Fortunately, two major methodologies -- portfolio management and lean -- have emerged over the past decade that can help you find and maintain that focus. But what if you could take these two proven approaches and bring them together? Would it work?

This Executive Report by Dr. Sara Cullen is the third in a four-part series on the outsourcing lifecycle. The series is based on a detailed understanding of the outsourcing experiences of 107 organizations. This report picks up where Part II left off and takes you through the final building block of the Architect Phase (Design) and the two building blocks of the Engage Phase (Select and Negotiate), the first two of four phases in the outsourcing lifecycle. These building blocks will have a crucial effect on how successful your outsourcing initiative will be.

Security

More major breaches have set the stage for regulations penalizing organizations when personal data in their files is compromised.

This Executive Report by Dr. Laurence Lock Lee focuses on the relationship aspects of business intelligence (BI). First, we examine the radical changes that are being experienced in today's business environment that potentially could render many existing BI solutions obsolete.

Agile methodologies are helping teams deliver software faster and with much higher quality than ever before. Given the success of agile at the team level, many managers are exploring the possibility of implementing these methodologies across the entire product-delivery organization.

Performance reviews seem to be an unpleasant necessity for most managers (and the people who receive them). Reviews of contract performance are probably treated with even more apprehension.

E-business

E-mail -- the 20th century's killer app -- is running into serious resistance in the 21st. Young people in particular are communicating in niche media; thus, the entire domain of business communication is becoming more and more fragmented.

Global companies labor under fixed costs such as taxation but can control variable costs such as labor, IT infrastructures, and repetitive processes. Both wireless technology (e.g., RFID, GPS, real-time location systems, and mobile computing) and the continuous improvement discipline (including lean and Six Sigma) target variable costs; together, they provide a methodology of creating and applying business rules that drive down variable costs. This Executive Report examines this combined "lean wireless" paradigm.

In the days before computers, businesspeople designed, tested, and deployed their own business systems. Then along came IT, with its huge benefits, but application development had to be done by specialists in a separate IT organization. Is this separation -- the "business-IT divide" -- permanent?

Innovation

The software as a service (SaaS) model has matured as a viable strategic alternative to conventional software service options. This Executive Report by Dr.

Many approaches to enterprise architecture (EA) are based upon ideas that are rooted in the 1970-1980s world of internal IT shops, which puts the focus on the framework as an instrument for keeping internal IT assets in order.

Simulation is not new to business intelligence (BI), but its significance is evolving. The BI utilities of modeling and scenario analysis involve simulation, and the highly networked modern enterprise is more measurable and predictable with simulation than it was without it. Yet intelligence and a learning organization are different things.

Innovation

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

— L.P. Hartley, opening lines of The Go-Between (1953)

The key technical barrier to capitalizing software components is our insistence on defining them as use-as-is, encapsulated executables.

The "open revolution" is now the mainstream. In addition to traditional markets for software and content, individuals and firms can also now look to the enormous "commons" of information and software that is openly available.

Quite simply, the Web has a huge impact on our personal and professional lives. It will continue to do so, becoming the dominant platform for everything from communication to business transaction processing. Within a decade, the personal/professional merger will be complete with virtually no distinctions between what we do to live and what we do to work.

With insight gleaned on technologies, strategies and new tools in the business intelligence, data integration, and collaboration space, your organization will improve the way it views, shares and leverages its corporate knowledge and critical business data.

Organizations that invest in product and process projects must have a plan for investing in these projects. The human resources needed to staff these projects almost always exceed the human resources available.

This Executive Report is the second in a four-part series on the outsourcing lifecycle. The series is based on a detailed understanding of the outsourcing experiences of 107 organizations. This report focuses on the first three building blocks — Investigate, Target, and Strategize — of the Architect Phase, which is the first of the four phases of the outsourcing lifecycle. The information here provides the strategic information you need to ensure the entire lifecycle works well.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

— L.P. Hartley, opening lines of The Go-Between (1953)

Operational technology will persist with hierarchical management structures, centralization, and standardization -- though the sourcing of infrastructure will change dramatically through "X as a service" delivery models, open source software, and thin-client architectures, among other infrastructure opportuniti

This Executive Report by Douglas K. Barry describes an incremental service-oriented architecture (SOA) technique that improves project selection in such a way that the chances of success for that project are also improved.