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

In a world of unlimited resources, managers would have no need to prioritize investment choices. Unfortunately, constraints of all kinds surround us. Organizations facing limitations in everything except the wish list of technology proposals seeking capital are hungry for ways to sequence investments in acknowledgement of these constraints.

There's a common thread in all of the current hot topics concerning enterprise architecture (from business-IT alignment to agile development to architectural conformance): they are all impossible without the timely availability of knowledge. The reason is simple; just ask yourself the following questions:

Employees who have used Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to easily search for and locate information on the Internet have complained for years that finding and accessing information within their own organizations is frustratingly difficult. There are a number of reasons that this is the case.

Now that business leaders have finally heard of agile, they think -- incorrectly -- that they can cherry-pick the agile pieces they like best. However, field experience has shown that unless combined with a well-planned agile adoption program, agile software projects, if they survive at all, will only be able to achieve a fraction of their potential.

Project tools were initially built for large linear projects and for the people managing those projects. Today, however, most people who manage projects are not professional project managers, and many people have begun to realize that projects are often anything but linear.

The outsourcing of innovation is an increasingly important phenomenon that can yield substantial benefits, but it requires careful management. Innovation is critical to business, and getting it wrong can be expensive. Outsourcing makes it possible to draw upon the expertise of researchers around the globe on a just-in-time basis.

During the past decade, I have had the chance to work with technologists, brand strategists, business strategists, marketers, salespeople, and creative types on various projects designed to directly or indirectly affect how the firm wins and keeps customers.

It seems that almost no one really knows what enterprise architecture (EA) is. Like many things, ask a dozen architects, and you'll get 20 different answers. This is for various reasons. For one, the field of EA as a mainstream activity is relatively new. Therefore, the industry as a whole has not had the chance to coalesce around a common definition. Another contributing factor is the breadth of EA.

What's all

It's in our interest as technology professionals to deliver the right message to nontechnology folks in order to help them understand major technology trends, opportunities, and best practices.

Industry experts often discuss enterprise architecture (EA) in terms of the following two ideas:

As a purely business function, translating enterprise missions and visions into strategic goals, and then tracking the implementation results so that operations are optimized without immediate considerations of technology

Companies that have been slow to adopt asset tracking systems and wireless sensor monitoring are finding the leap to these technologies much shorter now than in years past. The biggest barrier to deploying real-time location systems (RTLS) and wireless sensor networks (WSN) was always the cost of installing a dedicated wireless network. Enterprises were understandably slow to implement proprietary networks and technologies that were neither scalable nor product-agnostic.

Knowing what an agile practice does will not ensure a team's ability to successfully use the practice to deliver better software. There are several ways a team can veer off track when trying to learn and internalize agile practices. Depending on the situation, a team may need to adapt a particular practice for its environment before it can be successfully adopted.

In almost every environment, there is a lesson tied to a century-old quote from George Santayana's The Life of Reason, first published in the early 1900s: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Nearly everything we do in technology depends on knowledge. But it is not just any kind of knowledge. It is a fast-moving and intense kind of knowledge. In fact, it is the challenge of mastering this fast-moving knowledge that draws young people, like moths to a flame, into the various disciplines that feed and care for computers.

A mobile enterprise architecture (MEA) incorporates the inherent advantages that mobility holds for the business, which are primarily derived from two specific characteristics of mobility: (1) location independence and (2) personalization. A comprehensive MEA treats mobility not as an add-on to the existing business processes but as an integral part of the enterprise architecture.

Virtu

Getting a group of people to move together toward a common objective is never easy. As a project manager dealing with teams of people, each of whom represents different constituents, comes from a different point of view, and is trying to pursue a different set of interests, your task is formidable indeed.

China is rapidly emerging as the new frontier of IT offshoring. While the image of China as a leading IT service provider may be new to some Western managers, this country is far from being a newcomer to the global IT outsourcing arena. In fact, China has been providing IT services to East Asian markets since the early 1990s and is now Japan's largest outsourcing base.

In many industries, products and services fall into family groups. For example, in the automotive industry, automobiles, trucks, and buses each fall into a different family. Of course, some vehicles fall between an automobile and a truck. However, this does not affect the existence of identifiable kinds of products.

It has been said that Cuba has the best auto mechanics in the world, especially when it comes to repairing American cars from the 1950s. Because of the trade embargo by the US government, Cubans have not been able to purchase American cars or parts since 1959. But there are still lots of 1950s vintage cars on the roads.

Agile development is a major force in the world of software development, and more organizations are using it for various projects with increasing success. Agile development has taught the software world the virtue of breaking large software projects down into a number of small, timeboxed iterations.

At one time, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) might have been considered staid. No more. ITIL's latest version 3 (ITIL V3) offers an eye-catching new approach for disciplined, effective IT management. It's attention-getting because the latest iteration of the framework is rooted in the idea that IT is a vehicle of value creation for business when the focus shifts from technologies the IT organization offers and toward business services that it can provision for its customers.