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.

As a manager, ask yourself this question: "Do I manage using techniques that are decades old and assume that changes in the business environment occur at a very slow pace?" Of course you don't. Today, change is the only constant in business, and the companies that are best able to accommodate and even embrace change are the most successful.

The orchestra has just finished a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, and the echoes of the last notes are hanging in the air of the concert hall. As the orchestra leader, you lower your baton and turn toward the audience only to encounter silence. What is going on, you wonder?

Much has been written about enterprise architecture (EA) and service-oriented architecture (SOA). And success with each is dependent on the other.

If you Google the term "agile certification," you will retrieve more than 1,170,000 search results. Most of the top 10 hits relate to some form of advertisement for a ScrumMaster certification or some debate about whether the words "certification" and "agile" actually go together.

This Executive Report builds on an earlier Cutter report [1] that discussed the 40 most common provisions required in any outsourcing contract (out of more than 100 possible provisions in any given contract).

India is one of the powerhouse countries of this century -- of that there can be little doubt. Its huge and diverse population is a growing opportunity, and the country's highly skilled, business-savvy workforce makes it an attractive business partner. As companies increasingly beat a well-trodden path to India's shores, many are finding that doing business in India is not as simple as signing contracts and producing products.

Innovation

Centralizing a corporation was once considered an efficient way to run an enterprise. Decisions and information processing occurred in an orderly, top-down, hierarchical manner.

The ultra-competitive nature of today's business world is driving companies to optimize the processes that impact their financial and operational performance. As a result, many companies are seeking to apply performance-driven management techniques to streamline their day-to-day business operations and facilitate better decisions across the organization.

A popular trend in project management is the establishment of a project support office (PSO), aka a project management office. Some organizations have implemented a PSO as a result of performing due diligence and concluding that this move is a good business decision.

Security centralization is the inevitable result of trends that have been operating within the IT environment for some time. These trends point to a need to define a single, coherent response to external threats; something that is capable of being budgeted, audited, and managed as an essential business process. In essence, centralization represents IT security coming of age.

How long did anyone think it would take for organizations to begin climbing the business process strategic sourcing/outsourcing value chain? Fortified with the experience and wisdom earned in first-generation projects motivated by the pursuit of cost reductions, managers have turned their attention to the possibilities of sourcing far more strategic processes, either from company offices in far-flung locations or from service providers. An entirely new generation of sourcing initiatives has arrived. How can your organization succeed?

Security

Identity theft is now such an Internet-enabled plague that the liability for damages is switching away from the individual victim to any institution that has personal data stolen.

In the mid-1980s, I joined the Big Eight audit firm of Deloitte Haskins and Sells. I was to be in charge of their IT strategic planning practice on the US West Coast.

While IT project management techniques are mature and effective, the discipline is inherently designed to support the completion of IT-related work without regard to the successful management of other IT projects. Certain business circumstances arise, however, when several IT projects share a common attribute, and their successful completion helps achieve some higher strategic objective sought by the organization.

Business architecture is a key link, perhaps the key link, between the enterprise and technology.

Open source business intelligence (BI) is attractive for a number of reasons, especially a lower initial cost, perceived lower overall cost, simplicity of operation, and adherence to standards. The power and capability of business intelligence is growing, and the capacity to perform sophisticated data analysis with easy-access reporting -- hallmarks of BI -- is increasingly attractive to smaller businesses that do not have the budget to undertake full-scale commercial implementations.

The distributed nature of projects in today's workplace deprives project managers of many of the traditional, authoritative management tools that were common not too long ago. In the past, staff working on a given project reported to and were accountable to the same organization as the project manager. The project staff all worked for the same department in the same company, were colocated with the project manager and with each other, and worked with each other on projects over a long period of time.

Privacy and trust are essential to maintaining good relationships with customers, employees, and business partners. Addressing privacy issues is also necessary in order to comply with a growing number of privacy regulations worldwide.

Offshore outsourcing of IT activities is receiving wider interest and acceptance among businesses and IT executives. Offshoring, which can be defined as acquiring a product or service from a provider in another country or developing systems and applications in a location in another country, has become a hot topic of intense debate and discussion not only in boardrooms and corporate strategic planning sessions but in union meetings and political campaigns as well [13].

Collaboration

In an era of ever-increasing digital bandwidth, we are confronted by a curious backlash: younger workers showing a marked preference for extremely limited bandwidth interaction.

Awareness is only one piece of an effective technology adoption plan; even the best technology is useless unless applied.

-- Jim Skinner, Leading Edge Forum [20]