TOPIC SUMMARY

If there's a mantra in IT, it's "Listen to your customer." We've had that preached at us -- and preached it ourselves at others -- almost from the beginning. In this month's Opinion, Council members, along with Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Vince Kellen, look at the wisdom of this advice. Not surprisingly, they detect ways it can skewer you -- and ways that not following it can hurt you as well. So you almost can't win. What else is new?

Increasingly, IT is contributing to environmental problems and, as such, must be part of the solution. IT must go green and help create a sustainable environment. Greening your IT systems and their use is both an economic and an environmental imperative, as well as your social responsibility. This Executive Report by San Murugesan examines the environmental impacts of IT and shows you how to go green with your IT systems and harness the new opportunities that arise.

More in this series Measuring Alignment in Agile Architecture: Part I -- Systems Pa

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

-- Theodore Hook (English author)

Another 3 am "go live" meeting.

Rain gushes down the wide, conference room windows. Occasional flashes of lightning cut across the rolling black sky, and thunder rattles the windowpanes.

Another 3 am meeting.

Another major issue.

Another last-minute decision to scrap the release.

The storm cannot possibly darken the mood any further. If you could broadcast the thoughts of those sitting around the conference room table, they would probably sound something like this:

There are vastly different ways in which internal service provision (insourcing) and market provision of services (outsourcing) operate. Depending on the degree of outsourcing performed in an organization, there can be a profound change in strategic and operational mechanisms.

Domain

Government

Assertion 164:

Changes in federal discovery rules are affecting the IT/legal partnership and creating new areas of business risk.

Business process models are one of the primary languages of the modern enterprise. Every business professional/manager and every IT professional/manager needs to understand business processes and business process modeling.

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are gaining momentum because they are perceived as the key for enterprises to achieve business agility, improved quality of service, quicker time to market, and lower total cost of ownership. While an SOA has the potential to deliver significant benefits to the business, those benefits do not come automatically.

There is a great deal going on in information management today. In theory, more information should mean more intelligence. But this isn't necessarily the case.

Project management is the management of creativity. Creativity requires a creative culture.

The phrase "It doesn't exist if it isn't written down" was coined long before the advent of computers and the Internet as tools for business communication. Communication and records that used to be sent via paper or maintained on hard copy now largely exist in electronic format.

Domain

Market mechanisms

Domain

IT industry

Assertion 162:

IT has been found to be an accelerator in a company's market share formula, controlling the speed of process innovation and the effectiveness of deployment. This reality is increasing the pressure on businesses to engage IT as an equal business partner in order to gain and sustain competitive advantage.

Compliance with regulations continues to have a significant impact on corporations, even after the first wave of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) has passed. In reality, proposing jail sentences for corporate officers who fail to comply with SOX only brought to central attention a matter that had been growing in importance for some time. This proposal raised regulatory compliance from a cost-benefits exercise to a task with "must do" status.

A planning, decision-making, and execution methodology is useful to business process sourcing just as a foundation and frame is useful to a house. Structure and support maximize the usefulness of both. In fact, without structure and support, you couldn't really call a house a house. Without a methodology, what do you call sourcing? Often enough, just messy and value killing.

Domain

IT industry

Assertion 162:

IT has been found to be an accelerator in a company's market share formula, controlling the speed of process innovation and the effectiveness of deployment. This reality is increasing the pressure on businesses to engage IT as an equal business partner in order to gain and sustain competitive advantage.

Conflict is a normal part of people working together, and to a point, conflict in the workplace is a healthy part of interactions between people. Without disagreements over ideas, there would be few new inventions or theories; the process of debating and resolving conflict can lead to new understandings and insights. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for conflict to become unproductive and create tension between coworkers, reduce productivity, and, in the extreme, lead to resignations or worse.

A business ecosystem, as introduced by James Moore [25], refers to the dynamic interaction of organizations in a community; over time, these groups co-evolve their capabilities and roles and tend to align themselves with the directions set by one or more companies that drive the evolution of the environment.

It's easy to push against an open door. It's also easy to fall flat on your face doing so or to discover that there is nothing worthwhile on the other side.

Many organizations find themselves overwhelmed with opportunities, initiatives, and required activities that are crucial to their continued success. Leaders bemoan the fact that they do not have enough time to get everything done. Unfortunately, we have yet to find a way to truly "get" more time, so instead we need to turn our attention to the workload. As such, leaders look for a way to get more done by doing less. How do you go about accomplishing this?

Warfare is often merely ontological.

Rightly or wrongly, Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that is predictably precipitating a bit of warfare. People are arguing over how we ought to describe the world. And in every struggle, there are three main participants: protagonists who optimistically push forward, antagonists who skeptically critique the protagonists, and idle bystanders who either dismiss the significance of the entire scuffle or revel in the ensuing mud bath.

THE LEGACY DILEMMA

In the world of information technology, the word "legacy" has anything but positive connotations. It brings to mind complex, hard-to-maintain applications; aging, less-than-efficient technologies; high operating costs; and lack of flexibility and responsiveness to business change. IT executives and staff members see not valuable business assets, but a series of challenges that somehow must be supported until they can be replaced.

For many years, the Object Management Group (OMG), a major industry consortium focused on open computing standards, has played a key role in the development of groundbreaking standards in all areas of software engineering, including model driven development (MDD), software development processes (SDPs), enterprise architecture (EA), and systems integration (SI). Recently, OMG has been making major efforts to integrate all of these standards under its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative.

Warfare is often merely ontological.

Rightly or wrongly, Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that is predictably precipitating a bit of warfare. People are arguing over how we ought to describe the world. And in every struggle, there are three main participants: protagonists who optimistically push forward, antagonists who skeptically critique the protagonists, and idle bystanders who either dismiss the significance of the entire scuffle or revel in the ensuing mud bath.