Enterprise architecture (EA) has taken on renewed importance in the past few years. Yet this is in contrast to the fact that EA has largely had a history of failure to deliver on promised value. Much of this disappointment can be traced to a lack of alignment with business drivers and requirements. As enterprise architects, it is incumbent upon us to understand and address these failures and to deliver value that aligns with business goals.

In order to achieve truly agile, innovative organizations, a change in our approach to performance management systems is necessary. This Executive Report introduces a new measurement system, the adaptive performance management system (APMS).

Attempting to quantify the economic value of security-related information technology is a lot like understanding the value of an insurance policy. Value stems less from what's delivered to the buyer and more from what costs and negative impacts the buyer avoids should a catastrophic event occur. Avoiding costs can be more powerful than saving or making money. The problem is that quantifying avoided costs is only truly possible after disaster strikes.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is inherently a collaborative activity between the vendor and the enterprise customer. As such, it involves close cooperation between two business entities to achieve a mutual goal. That goal should be the fulfillment of obligations for the optimal operation of client services. The client obtains essential services, such as human resources, IT, or financial business process operations, and the vendor gains financial remuneration.

Domain

Innovation

Assertion 151

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.

The future ain't what it used to be.

-- Yogi Berra

Enterprise architecture (EA) has taken on renewed importance in the past few years. Yet this is in contrast to the fact that EA has largely had a history of failure to deliver on promised value. Much of this disappointment can be traced to a lack of alignment with business drivers and requirements. As enterprise architects, it is incumbent upon us to understand and address these failures and to deliver value that aligns with business goals.

Thousands of organisations (large and small) in every business sector around the world are achieving remarkable gains from well-managed reengineering and process change projects. Their secret? They have distilled the real "wisdom" of reengineering and applied it to their key business processes. This is business process management in action.

-- Business Process Management Journal [3]

Business is increasingly moving toward a marketplace model, which is in sharp contrast to the traditional view of an organization as a production line. In this new world, organizations collaborate together, consuming and offering services to maximize efficiency, better serve customers, and achieve long-term advantage. This is the world of service orientation in which simply automating business activities in software is no longer sufficient; software must be agile enough to cope with change and foster innovation.

A large part of the IT community today seems to be busy applying the principles of service orientation in software product development efforts. What started as a specific programming technique and architectural principle later evolved into a philosophy of taming the complexity of enterprise IT by turning it into a heap of interchangeable, standardized "software LEGO bricks" and finally has become a fashionable concept used in IT marketing.

An understanding of the basic concepts of business rules and how a rule-based system (RBS) works is becoming essential knowledge as the impact of RBSs on our daily lives is continuously increasing.

It's no longer enough to respond to change; today organizations must lead change or be left behind.

More in this series Risk Management 2006: A Comprehensive Survey Part I Part II

In 2002, Cutter Consortium conducted its first comprehensive survey of the state of risk management practice in the IT community [5].

The service-level agreement (SLA) is a critical element in the suite of contractual and governing documents that surround any outsourcing engagement. This Executive Report provides an overview of SLAs including their purpose and key elements. It then discusses the necessary preparations as you make the decision to create an SLA, before detailing the seven sections of this document. The report concludes with suggestions for drafting an SLA.

After finally experiencing the law of diminishing returns on efficiency improvements, many companies are now placing innovation as a top priority. Innovation requires a different environment and a different culture; most companies will require an extreme makeover in order to be successful.

In the last few years, all of us in the IT industry, and many of the general public, have come to accept free and open source software (F/OSS) as a fact of life. While some of its more esoteric aspects -- such as the precise distinction between free software and OSS or the enchanted world of F/OSS licensing -- are little understood, most of us could reel off half a dozen or so F/OSS packages.

Hundreds of articles have been written about an industry-wide problem that I like to call the "IT-business disconnect," or the gap that exists between business and IT. It's an issue that consistently receives a lot of press because it costs companies around the world billions of dollars in lost productivity annually.

Hundreds of articles have been written about an industry-wide problem that I like to call the "IT-business disconnect," or the gap that exists between business and IT. It's an issue that consistently receives a lot of press because it costs companies around the world billions of dollars in lost productivity annually.

Hundreds of articles have been written about an industry-wide problem that I like to call the "IT-business disconnect," or the gap that exists between business and IT. It's an issue that consistently receives a lot of press because it costs companies around the world billions of dollars in lost productivity annually.

Writing software is hard. Depending on your perspective, this can be a good thing or a bad thing. I once had a colleague tell me that he was glad that writing software is hard because if it wasn't hard, then anybody could do it, and if anybody could do it, he would not get paid as well. If you are on the management side of the equation, however, then the fact that writing software is hard is not such a good thing, because that means that getting software written can be expensive.

Domain

Organizational matters

Assertion 149

Savvy organizations -- including those that provide emergency assistance after a major crisis and those that may be victims of such crises -- are beginning to establish the appropriate technological infrastructure and social relationships necessary to create "hastily formed networks" (HFNs) more quickly and effectively.

Editor's note: All uncited remarks and quotations used in this report are from personal phone interviews with the author.

As the IT applications development business grows, the frequency of projects requiring multiple teams for their execution will also grow. In fact, with the added need for globalization affecting nearly every application, most, if not all, IT development projects will involve more than one team.

More in this series Risk Management 2006: A Comprehensive Survey Part I Part II

In 2002, Cutter Consortium conducted its first comprehensive survey of the state of risk management practice in the IT community [2].

Read the Executive Summary