Although still a somewhat ambiguous term, "cloud computing" represents a watershed in both the evolution of outsourced service provision and in data center infrastructure. Public clouds provide outsourced services in a manner that incorporates efficiency, flexibility, scalability, and improvements in charging under a pay-as-you-go utility model.

Agile sponsorship and agile project management are based on three principles: simplicity, speed, and transparency. These principles provide a foundation for a fundamental change in the roles and behaviors of project sponsors.

Many organizations are increasingly coming up against difficult governance issues as they ramp up their early service-oriented architecture (SOA) efforts.

IT strategy

Risk management as practiced in the financial sector has now been revealed as a charade. Risk management as practiced in IT is probably little better.

Negotiations become more challenging during economic hard times.

"Service-oriented architecture" (SOA) is a powerful term regularly abused by its constant reference to developmental technologies rather than its architectural approach. This Executive Report by Dr. Amit K. Maitra discusses SOA in the context of "services" as the term applies to architecture and to "architecture" as it applies to exposing the services.

Ontology engineering is now a desirable skill for professionals working in IT as well as for managers who have to weigh the costs of related projects. It consists of a complex combination of specialized activities and is a bit of an art as well as a science.

Tapping into the full potential of an organization's human capital, especially in a project environment, remains a difficult challenge.

System architecture

Information systems architecture is losing its meaning and organizations are losing its benefits due to a combination of marketplace dynamics and malpractice. We should either cure the patient or bury the body.

Business capabilities are fast emerging as a challenge to the traditional mindset of the business process. Both business architecture and software development methodologies are increasingly embracing business capabilities, which are heralded as an important breakthrough in business-IT alignment. How much truth is there in these claims?

Getting outsourcing wrong can seriously disable any business. On the upside, the accumulated evidence demonstrates that outsourcing, when properly planned, resourced, and accomplished, can deliver significant strategic advantage to firms and governments in every sector. To help you understand the successful outsourcing journey, this year we present a series of four Executive Reports by Dr. Sara Cullen that detail the outsourcing lifecycle.

The need for a new type of professional has quietly emerged below the radar and onto the project landscape.

Organizational matters

Many organizations are depleting their systems analysis staff -- or have no systems analysts at all. This is not a matter of job titles; this is an important loss of systems skill sets. While the world is demanding IT efficiency and effectiveness, many IT organizations are turning to amateurs, yet expect these novices to somehow magically be professionals.

Business capabilities are fast emerging as a challenge to the traditional mindset of the business process. Both business architecture and software development methodologies are increasingly embracing business capabilities, which are heralded as an important breakthrough in business-IT alignment.

Are you computing in the clouds -- working with a constellation of computing resources accessed via the Internet? If not, you will be sooner or later. Cloud computing, touted to be the next big thing in IT, promises to offer utilitylike availability of huge computing resources and is attracting lots of interest among the IT community and businesses.

IT strategy

With more and more companies unwilling or unable to invest in up-front capital costs for projects, lots of noise is being made about cloud computing as a fast and efficient deployment environment. Most companies will be wary but willing. Can you afford not to get involved?

In a time of aggressive cost-cutting, CIOs and other decision makers in an IT organization can play a key role in helping business units find cost-cutting quick-wins while also reducing the risks that such cost-cutting will compromise IT's future service abilities.

Application developers need to handle a surprising amount of software technology. Platform suppliers cater to many architectural styles, thereby leaving a gap between their platforms and an application's business function. Filling this gap takes time and effort and reduces the "agility" -- simplicity and resilience -- of the application code.

In this Executive Report, Ken Collier and Dan O'Leary introduce an enhanced data warehousing architecture designed to enable developers to respond quickly to new requirements and to adapt easily to change. The Message Driven Warehouse uses a generalized Java Message Service format to push rather than pull source data into a domain-independent, adaptive data model in the warehouse.

Agile adoption initiatives both succeed and fail, and there is no agreement on why they do one or the other. The current focus for scaling agile seems to be on modifying existing agile practices, adding new ones, and getting the right toolset installed.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and its fundamental concern for quality IT service delivery and management provides a completely fresh way of identifying the full range of risks that organizations face in conceiving, funding, executing, and operating IT services that support business objectives. ITIL strategic and tactical objectives are as clear as the desert sky. Because of this clarity, managers should find it easier to document the potential risks in failing to fulfill ITIL's prescriptions.

IT strategy

With more and more companies unwilling or unable to invest in up-front capital costs for projects, lots of noise is being made about cloud computing as a fast and efficient deployment environment. Most companies will be wary but willing. Can you afford not to get involved?

Each of the lessons, or "apparent truths," presented in this Executive Report by David Spann was discovered by one or more firms who actually went through an agile implementation process.