If the primary aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

-- Thomas Aquinas

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.

-- George Patton

This Executive Report challenges the presumption that outsourcing IT services is inherently better than performing the same work within the corporation, and makes a case for alternatives to full or partial outsourcing. Over the past 15 or 20 years, the concept of sourcing a variety of IT services from outside vendors has developed into a major business endeavor for both supplier and end user alike.

Market mechanisms

SOA is the latest in a series of vendor-driven initiatives that, by being vague about their contents and less than candid about their goals, sow confusion in our industry.

Writing an article about organizational resilience seems as exciting as reading about the steps for a root canal and expecting readers to get interested in it. From that perspective, it seems prudent to garner some positive reader motivation before diving into the mechanics of this topic.

Competitive bidding has been found to be the most common supplier selection technique for outsourcing, with most organizations using a tender (a request for proposal, or RFP) to see how the marketplace would respond to its needs [2]. This approach not only puts pressure on suppliers to deliver their best value for the money against their peers, but it also gives the organization the information it needs to evolve and mature its selection decision.

IT strategy

Systemic agile methods implementations across organizations are replacing the periodic "rogue" project team implementations of previous periods.

We all formulate IT strategies from one of several states, be it the state in which strategies are survival tactics or the state where the organization, led by IS, 1 decides to use technology to fundamentally alter the basic nature of the industry in which it exists. Some of these states are considered more desirable than others, some are mere transitions, some offer traps to the unwary, and some are available only briefly and must be seized lest the opportunity they afford disappears.

Over the past few years, the value of enterprise architecture (EA) has become preeminent for many companies in their business-wide application integration initiatives. This trend is evident in both government agencies as well as commercial sectors across the global IT industry.

Technology only has value if you can do something with it.

-- Dr. Robert Phaal, Fellow, Cutter Consortium

Within the past decade, continued advances in mobile computing and wireless communications have had a profound impact on individuals, businesses, and society at large. Mobile and mobility have become buzzwords, and many mobile applications, both traditional and entirely new and novel, have been deployed [15, 16].

About a year ago, Cutter Senior Consultant Alistair Cockburn and I were discussing what makes up a successful project when he asked about my personal experience in project management and what I thought were the important precursors to success.

Candor is an interesting thing. It frees us on the one hand but constrains us on the other -- and so it is with the people in our technology lives. Sometimes we love them, sometimes we hate them. Sometimes they perform well, sometimes they perform poorly. How candid are we about the technology professionals we rely upon so much? How candid are we about the executive teams that depend on them and direct their efforts?

The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) is incomplete and evolving. However, it has reached a level of detail and prevalence within the US federal government that agencies are now developing or honing FEA-based enterprise architecture programs, and system development projects include FEA considerations.

Enterprise systems (ES) are being widely adopted by organizations in all types of industry and geographical locations, and there now exists considerable research on the impact of ES implementations on these organizations [6, 7]. The promoted strategic advantage of an ES is that it can integrate business functions into a single system with a shared database, allowing organizations to develop a homogenous enterprise-wide information systems (IS) infrastructure.

Today's fast-paced project environments coupled with organizations that lack good formal project management are creating project lifecycles short on the necessary up-front planning. These accelerated lifecycles can be the beginning of runaway (off schedule and budget) and distressed projects.

A plethora of resources exists that attempts to assist organizations in drafting their outsourcing arrangements. Well-meaning individuals frequently publish, on the Internet, contracts they have developed in their organizations. These, while undoubtedly useful to the writer at the time, are often less useful to others (who are not from the same organization, are not using the same vendor, are not in the same country, do not have the same scope, do not have the same issues but have other issues not addressed, and so on).

Imagine that you are a CIO responsible for negotiating next year's annual contract with a large software vendor. On the one hand, you are charged with getting the best possible deal for your company from this vendor. On the other hand, this vendor is the only provider of the particular software package that is ideal for your application, and selecting any other vendor would cause a painful and expensive redesign of the software and procedures on your end.

Market mechanisms

The growing phenomenon of "infinite inventory" and nearly free distribution of goods, combined with increasingly sophisticated search mechanisms like Google, has begun shifting attention away from the familiar 80-20 Pareto Principle. In the coming years, more companies will begin focusing on the "long tail" of products and services, selling less and less to more and more niche markets.

It has always been the case that as an organization gets bigger and more, diverse it becomes progressively harder for separate groups to communicate with each other. Moreover, as each department's functions become more specialized, a language arises from the specialty that further divides departments. In the past, companies dealt with this through the organizational hierarchy that limited the actual communication that took place between departments.

The emergence of agile techniques fundamentally shook the world of software development. It changed not only the practices of software development, but also our understanding of how to think about the process in the first place. It helped evolve our mental models of what software development is really all about. This shift has taken firm root in the software industry and for good reason.

Responsibility for completing a mission and the resources needed to pursue it traditionally align with organizational boundaries. However, conditions and circumstances that drive the business environment, such as globalization and the fast pace of technological change, have led to increased collaboration and partnering among organizations.

Risks in business process offshoring are extensive. Since, often, awareness of risks can mean avoiding them, managers lacking offshoring experience are particularly vulnerable. One way to understand the dimensions of these risks is to view them through the prism of the offshoring lifecycle, which defines the totality of decisions and actions that must be taken from the offshoring idea on the front end through a steady state relationship with an offshoring service provider (OSP) on the back end.

IT industry

The current prevailing mechanism of software pricing is doomed; what will ensue is a period of chaos followed by the emergence of a services model in which supplying free or nearly free software is the price of doing business.

Stories of project and system failures due to miscommunication between business and IT abound, and despite a variety of real or perceived solutions -- be they business, technological, social, or other (including combinations of these) -- complaints, mostly from business stakeholders but also from IT, persist.

In the time-honored tradition of earlier buzzwords such as "dot-com," "Web services," and "business process management," the media and the blogosphere are currently humming with discussion of a phenomenon called "Web 2.0." The implication of this name is that the original Web, "Web 1.0," has somehow become worn out or obsolete, and that it is fast being replaced with a newer, better model.

Innovation

The application of wikis will increasingly infiltrate forward-thinking, mainstream enterprises in the form of applications that will save these companies money and enable them to collaborate, and therefore innovate, in new ways.