This Executive Report by Steve Andriole is the second in a series that describes the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and the impact they are having in the enterprise.

While effective service sourcing strategies are absolutely critical for effective outsourcing, they are commonly misunderstood and ill defined. Worse still, the execution of these approaches tends to be somewhat isolated, both from the domain of software architecture and development and the world of business decision making.

As businesses open up to interact with and leverage social networking environments and tools, we find users, customers, partners, and suppliers are taking up important roles, each day becoming more involved in the R&D of all commercial products and services.

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.

Innovation

Today's harsh economic realities threaten to drive the creative spirit from IT organizations, throttling back the flow of capital and new ideas; the innovation agenda in IT is on life support.

Anyone who spends time supporting complex IT environments will experience a major outage at some point in his or her career. In many cases, the experience is traumatic, leaving a lasting and painful impression.

The enterprise needs marketing more than ever in these difficult times. But without the ability to measure the effectiveness of specific marketing activities, optimizing the use of marketing's resources is impossible, as is fact-based decision making. As discussed in this Executive Report by Christophe Meili, Michael Guttman, and John Parodi, marketing performance management (MPM) addresses these issues, thereby allowing marketing to use its central position to integrate efforts of other functions and to help achieve the strategic goals of the enterprise.

Scrum is a lightweight management process that incorporates many of the elements that later became part of the Agile Manifesto and provides a methodology-agnostic and empirical platform for handling the needs of complex programming tasks where requirements are constantly shifting.

The business, project, and operational environments facing us today are becoming increasingly complex, interrelated, and interdependent. Without an adequate understanding of these complexities, today's programs are at increasing risk of partial or complete failure. But how does anyone acquire this understanding?

New buyers often come into an IT organization right out of school with neither the vision, the skills, nor the confidence to do their jobs well. Some thrive, some survive, and some drop out, but for many the path they wind up taking from newcomer to successful IT sourcing professional could have been more systematic, supportive, and effective.

Let's face it, nobody today is thinking about anything other than the unraveling global economy and its effect on our companies and our lives. So we'd be crazy to write about any other subject. Our topic is trends, and this is the mother of all trends.

This Executive Report looks at common architectural titles and roles and describe what responsibilities are typically associated with those roles. Then, it looks at the skills that all architects have in common and describe 10 things that every architect can do to add value to his or her organization.

Systematic and deliberate knowledge management (KM) of knowledge-related processes and intellectual capital (IC) assets is pursued by competent enterprises throughout the world. Its purpose is to facilitate enterprise actions to be highly effective by building, maintaining, making available, and safeguarding IC assets from operational, tactical, and strategic perspectives.

As a percentage of gross revenue, technology budgets are growing. At the same time, the contribution that technology can make to the business is expanding. The key is to identify the technology acquisition, deployment, and support strategies most likely to help you save/make money. This Executive Report outlines a framework of assessments pertaining to strategy, leadership, culture, organization, awareness, technology, metrics, and sourcing.

As a percentage of gross revenue, technology budgets are growing. At the same time, the contribution that technology can make to the business is expanding. The key is to identify the technology acquisition, deployment, and support strategies most likely to help you save/make money.

As the complexity of IT grows, more and more organizations are realizing the need for architecture. But the definition of what architecture is, the titles that architects have, and the role of an architect vary widely from one organization to another. Business, IT, management, and even architects don't necessarily know what a good architect does to add value in his or her organization. This Executive Report by Michael Rosen discusses the role of the architect and describes 10 activities that architects should perform to add value to projects.

It seems that nobody knows what an architect does. In this Executive Report, we look at this issue from two different angles. First, we look at common architectural titles and roles and describe what responsibilities we typically see associated with those roles across the industry. Then, we look at the skills that all architects have in common and describe 10 things that every architect can do to add value to his or her organization. (Not a client? Download your complimentary copy of this report here.)

Systematic and deliberate knowledge management (KM) of knowledge-related processes and intellectual capital (IC) assets is pursued by competent enterprises throughout the world.

Use Cutter's business technology, security, sourcing, enterprise risk, governance, innovation, and trends expertise in your organization, and gain tools that enable you to make better short-and long-term decisions.

The project management landscape can be defined based on two variables: goal clarity and solution clarity. Allowing these variables to take on two values (clear or not clear) generates five project management lifecycle models: linear, incremental, iterative, adaptive, and extreme.

IT strategy

Incessantly focusing on cheaper and faster has not made systems or organizations better. This strategy is leaving IT in a precarious position without an adequate infrastructure to address today's complex challenges.

Organizations seeking to raise their quality of IT management might consider the concept of the business services catalog, a centralized electronic compendium of administrative and application services that helps employees get work done. The services catalog concept is a process requirement of the IT Infrastructure Library V3 (ITIL V3).

A large amount of information is available describing the potential benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as well as the best practices, architecture guidelines, and design patterns to achieve them. However, putting SOA to the test in a real-world project always provides the most valuable insights.

Many people are aware of collective intelligence (CI) and the exciting prospects associated with it; however, fully understanding the complexity and underlying dynamics that shape CI takes quite a bit of reading and research.