From quality to management to team building, every organization applies its own nuances to the implementation of business practices. Be it individual leadership style or regulatory mandate, unique interpretations of what's required lead to unique applications of these practices. Risk management is no exception.

Successful outsourcing arrangements cannot be guaranteed by virtue of having a signed contract alone. The contract is a necessary but insufficient governance tool for outsourcing.

IT technology

Agent technology is now necessary to reduce costs; to improve efficiency and effectiveness; and to support the requirements of individuals, groups, companies, and universities as they collaborate globally. More importantly, it will enable us to create and support a whole class of IT applications and approaches that we previously could not have developed.

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]

While 2007 looks like another interesting year for enterprise architecture, what will be most important? What are the trends? To answer these questions, this Executive Report assembles a collection of articles from several Cutter Senior Consultants on some of the more important topics.

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about five exabytes1 of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks. [6]

The agile movement is now more than five years old, measured from the authoring of the Agile Manifesto. In this time frame, many organizations have implemented agile methods, with many more planning agile transitions.

The original or traditional role of the information technology (IT) organization within companies was one of a service function, a cost center whose purpose was to allow the other, money-making departments within the company to perform their functions more effectively. "The IT guy" was the person you called when you needed to install new software on your PC, when you had trouble connecting to the network, or when you wanted to add hardware to your system.

Reference model: A structure which allows the modules and interfaces of a system to be described in a consistent manner. [5]

Reference model: A standard definitive document or conceptual representation of a system or process. [2]

The job of the modern CIO is tough. CIOs face tremendous pressure from their customers along many dimensions; the following are just a few of the many that come to mind:

Everyone wants their infrastructure applications, such as e-mail, to be reliable, easy to use, and always available.

Users of operational systems pressure the CIO to let them select the operational system that they think best meets their discrete needs.

The agile movement is now more than five years old, measured from the authoring of the Agile Manifesto. In this time frame, many organizations have implemented agile methods, with many more planning agile transitions.

Like bad weather, information security risks are here for the duration. Maintaining the stance of constant vigilance against persistent threats to information assets requires an information security management structure more disciplined, more organizationally embedded, and, generally, more effective than what some companies have today. In other words, these companies should consider an information security management methodology.

Today, most of our IT budget is spent on third-party costs. The days of building an internal team, creating customized, inhouse developed applications, architecting a homegrown infrastructure, and staffing a single, local help desk are long gone for many companies. No one has the time, money, or resources to experiment with technology anymore. Business demands are too important and immediate. CEOs are expecting a strong ROI from their IT investments.

IT industry

This month, the Cutter Business Technology Council shares its opinions on the business technology trends that will likely impact your organization in 2007 and offers advice for achieving competitive advantage. These predictions will assist you in making informed business decisions that strive toward the optimization of upcoming trends.

We are witnessing a boom in "social software" -- the next generation of online collaborative environments that leverage the vast wealth of connections in our networks. There is great potential for this type of software to be used in organizational and business contexts, provided collaboration is also well understood as a culture and a philosophy.

It is common knowledge that more than two-thirds of all software projects today do not succeed for a variety of reasons: they are either terminated, become obsolete, exceed time restrictions or budget, or deliver a reduced set of functionality. Ambiguous and incomplete software requirements along with insufficient testing are major contributors to these failures [51].

An old saying about armed conflict states, "You never see the one that gets you." The same can be said of a variety of liability and compliance risks affecting businesses. Sometimes the greatest legal threat to a company comes from a source that the company or its counsel never would have expected.

Outsourcing to Ireland has exploded during the last two decades, and some of the world's largest IT companies now have bases of operation in Ireland that provide products and support to their offices worldwide. What is perceived and actively encouraged by industry sources in Ireland is the continued promotion of the Irish marketplace as an environment for value-added services.

IT industry

After decades of employment gains in information technology, women have quickly reversed the trend and are now rapidly abandoning IT -- leading to the defeminization of IT.

Many excellent books and articles have been published concerning the need for simplicity and about the serious, and often dangerous, problems due to complexity (to business ventures in general and to IT in particular). I will not provide a survey of all this literature (although many examples are mentioned in this Executive Report), but instead will start with a couple of revealing statements that shed some light on these complexities.

In my role as enterprise architecture (EA) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) consultant, some o

As the years have passed, the Balanced Scorecard has gone through two stages of development: a business indicators stage focused on performance measurement and a strategic modeling stage1 focused on integrating performance measurement into organizational strategy. The field has been remarkably successful. The Balanced Scorecard has been adopted and applied worldwide.

Everyone in IT is talking about service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Coming out of nowhere, blogs have become commonplace in today's Internet-connected world. Only a few years ago, social media, like blogs, were strictly the province of hard-core geeks. But now, grandmothers, public relations (PR) flacks, and teenagers have joined the digerati, posting their political views, their cookie recipes, and their innermost thoughts on the newest boy band, and sharing these posts with friends, family, and the wide, wide world.

Corporate project portfolios are routinely challenged in many organizations. Executives will often see projects that are late and overbudget, deliver poor value, and have less-than-satisfied business sponsors and end users. In this Executive Report by Sanjiv Augustine and Roland Cuellar, we offer suggestions on how to combine Agile project delivery at the project level with Lean thinking at the portfolio level in order to significantly increase project throughput, financial investment performance, and business sponsor satisfaction.