While effective service sourcing strategies are absolutely critical for effective outsourcing, they are commonly misunderstood and ill defined. Worse still, execution of these approaches often tends to be somewhat isolated both from the domain of software architecture and development and the world of business decision making.

Advances in IT change the way people and organizations operate. On a daily basis, new tools, devices, and functionalities that have an impact on and modify existing processes become available. Organizations struggle to keep up with technological progress that sometimes is incremental and builds on previous technologies, but other times is disruptive and requires a radical transformation of working habits.

The purpose of the accompanying Executive Report is to look back over the past seven-plus years, as if it was the end of an agile project's first iteration, reflect on the things I've learned through the agile movement, offer some recommendations for change, and provide a case study illustrating one c

Anyone who has spent time supporting complex IT environments will experience a major outage at some point in his or her career. In many cases, the experience is traumatic, leaving a lasting and painful impression on those involved or worse, precipitating significant job changes for some.

Recent developments in the area of technology management show pr

Today, companies are dealing with the ever-increasing pace of change in the marketplace. In these difficult times, companies will plan and execute even more marketing campaigns aimed at customers, partners, and stakeholders. Yet there is no good way to measure the effectiveness of such marketing campaigns, largely because the traditional view of marketing's function is to increase sales, and marketing's efforts to do so can only be seen and measured in the aggregate.

In the past several years, Scrum has emerged as one of the most valuable tools in the agile workshop due to its versatility and lightweight characteristics. It is concerned with the basic processes of agile development and does not concern itself with programming style. For this reason, it has helped to provide unifying principles for agile that permit flexibility of development.

The business, project, and operational environments facing us today are becoming increasingly complex, interrelated, and interdependent. Managers at all levels are struggling to understand this complexity and make effective decisions about schedules, resources, and their products. Without an adequate understanding of these complexities, today's programs are at increasing risk of partial or complete failure. But how do you achieve an overall, broad understanding of risk in a huge, complex program without being overwhelmed by too much information?

New buyers often come into an IT organization right out of school and are thrown into their first jobs lacking the vision, the skills, and the confidence they need to do their jobs well. Some thrive, some survive, and some drop out. However, for many of these individuals, the path they wind up taking, from newcomer to successful IT sourcing professional, could have been more systematic, supportive, and effective.

The accompanying Executive Report outlines an optimization audit in response to new opportunities and old pitfalls. Areas include: strategy; applications; networks; data; organization, people, and culture; metrics; benchmarks; security; and delivery.

This Executive Summary and its accompanying Executive Report look at common architectural titles and roles and describe what responsibilities are typically associated with those roles. Then, it explores the skills that all architects have in common and describe 10 things that every architect can do to add value to his or her organization. Not a client? Receive a complimentary copy of this report. 

The concept of "knowledge management" (KM) has been around for 25 years and is known to most business practitioners. KM, as practiced by competent enterprises and discussed in this report, is defined as:

To give you a clear understanding of our journey through the contemporary world of project management, we can make a strong parallel with the idea of being a cook or a chef. You can learn to be a cook and be able to routinely follow the recipes of others, or you can learn to be a chef and be able to create recipes for cooks to follow.

The inclusion of the services catalog concept in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology is not just the best place to begin methodology implementation but also represents a potent approach to IT management improvements for organizations in desperate need of them.

A large amount of information is available describing the potential benefits of SOA as well as the best practices, architectural guidelines, and design patterns to achieve them. However, putting SOA to the test in a real-world project always provides the most valuable insights. The accompanying Executive Report discusses a case study based on a project that was conducted for one of the world's leading chauffeured services companies.

Only a few centuries ago -- a small fragment of time in the history of humanity -- the printing process dramatically changed the way knowledge was recorded and exchanged, facilitating the spread of technological progress.

Are agile projects more successful in the sense that they deliver more functionality with fewer defects, in the words of XP visionary and Cutter Senior Consultant Kent Beck? Specifically, how do agile projects compare to waterfall or plan-based projects? If your company is considering switching to agile, what might you expect? What have other companies experienced?

At the heart of risk management and governance of service-oriented applications is the need to achieve agreed and measurable quality of service (QoS) levels.

Hardly a day goes by that you can't pick up another publication espousing the necessity of "IT strategic alignment." The importance of this concept has grown over the years as corporations have seen the increasing role that information management plays in their business.

Innovation is a key to the competitive differentiation equation, and technology factors strongly in that equation. This Executive Summary and its accompanying Executive Report present a story that with charming acuity conveys key principles of innovation, and relate the lessons to system development. 

Knowledge management (KM) and business intelligence (BI) play crucial roles in the effective management of intellectual capital (including data, information, and knowledge), which is widely recognized as a source of sustainable competitive advantage for contemporary organizations.

All agile methodologists share a common foundation: they all believe that delivering iterative demonstrations of real software to real customers provides the shortest and safest path to delivering real value.

The accompanying Executive Report discusses the practical importance of considering sourcing as a business strategy. The report begins with a discussion on the philosophical background for sourcing. Sourcing becomes smart when it (1) becomes a formal part of a business strategy and (2) has a repeatable and manageable process to follow.

The accompanying Executive Report describes applied research that is intended to help readers understand and measure the impact of the deployment of the technologies collectively known as Web 2.0. These include wikis, blogs, podcasts, folksonomies, mashups, social networks, virtual worlds, and RSS filters.

Although the necessity of refactoring is not being questioned by agile developers, its business justification has always been doubted by "outsiders." The accompanying Executive Report proposes a means of support for refactoring efforts and initiatives through enterprise architecture (EA), specifica