In the last three years, we've witnessed the rapid emergence of Web 2.0 in various forms -- blogs, wikis, social networks, Web mashups, and RSS feeds -- and many individuals and enterprises have embraced it.

Although the unavoidable tension between quality of production and speed to market is centuries old, we still treat the problem of quality in rapid software development as a new one. If we examine historical lessons, we can figure out how to update them to create an innovative and modern approach to quality assurance (QA) within a development organization.

There are vastly different ways in which internal service provision (insourcing) and market provision of services (outsourcing) operate. Depending on the degree of outsourcing performed in an organization, there can be a profound change in strategic and operational mechanisms.

Throughout large enterprises everywhere, there is an increased interest in business process management. Indeed, a number of the world's leading business theorists suggest that highly integrated business processes are one of the best ways for organizations to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has the potential to play a significant role in aligning business and IT and to deliver key benefits to the business. However, those benefits do not come automatically. The architecture needs to be defined following sound SOA guidelines, and the services must be designed according to service-oriented analysis and design (SOAD) principles, with loose coupling being one of the most important principles.

Once a cognitive instrument used by ancient philosophers and naturalists to help them understand and represent the world, ontology today comes up in the most disparate departments of knowledge-based organizations as a solution to help us make sense of our information world.

In a previous Executive Report, "Agile Project Governance" (see Enterprise Risk Management & Governance Executive Report, Vol. 3, No.

Businesses now rely on electronic communications and records, but the legal system has taken longer to adapt to this shift. The US federal courts recently adopted rule changes governing electronic documents (the "e-discovery rules"). The accompanying Executive Report discusses six key e-discovery issues and lists important e-discovery do's and don'ts.

Conflict is a normal part of people working together, and to a point, conflict in the workplace is a healthy part of interactions between people. Without disagreements over ideas, there would be few new inventions or theories; the process of debating and resolving conflict can lead to new understandings and insights. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for conflict to become unproductive and destructive.

A business ecosystem refers to the dynamic interaction of organizations in a community; over time, these groups co-evolve their capabilities and roles and tend to align themselves with the directions set by one or more companies that drive the evolution of the environment.

The saturation of the technology and business media with references to "community-based this" and "user-created that" makes it difficult for business decision makers to separate hype from reality and to visualize the practical applications of exciting, but sometimes vague, concepts.

Many organizations find themselves overwhelmed with opportunities, initiatives, and required activities that are crucial to their continued success. Leaders bemoan the fact that they do not have enough time to get everything done. Unfortunately, we have yet to find a way to truly "get" more time, so instead we need to turn our attention to the workload. As such, we need to find a way to get more done by doing less. How is this accomplished?

Concern over regulations took center stage in many businesses with the introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). This act requires corporations to make significant changes to their business processes, often at great cost. While SOX is now under control to some degree, it has brought in its wake a need to create continuous systems for monitoring compliance, as well as a new urgency to deal with regulations in a unified way in order to cut costs and to provide room for process improvement and efficiency.

If you accept the proposition that embracing the use of a planning, decision-making, and execution management methodology can boost sourcing initiative value creation, then your thoughts probably turn directly to this: how do you get your hands on one? Build it. It's not as hard as you think.

Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that inevitably has people taking sides. Today, it appears most corporate enterprises are looking at Web 2.0 with a bit of bewilderment, if not some detachment. After all, the main participants in Web 2.0 are considerably younger than the executives who must make decisions regarding it. Many CIOs simply don't use technology in quite the same way as teenagers and young adults do and hence are not immersed in the Web 2.0 culture.

In the world of IT, the word "legacy" has anything but positive connotations. It brings to mind complex, hard-to-maintain applications; aging, less-than-efficient technologies; high operating costs; and lack of flexibility and responsiveness to business change. Too often, IT executives and staff consider legacy systems to be a drain of investment dollars from development efforts rather than valuable business assets that can be effectively managed.

For many years, the Object Management Group (OMG) has played a key role in the development of groundbreaking standards in all areas of software engineering, including model driven development (MDD), software development processes (SDPs), enterprise architecture (EA), and systems integration. Recently, OMG has been making major efforts to integrate all of these standards under its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative.

Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that inevitably has people taking sides. Today, it appears most corporate enterprises are looking at Web 2.0 with a bit of bewilderment, if not some detachment. After all, the main participants in Web 2.0 are considerably younger than the executives who must make decisions regarding it. Many CIOs simply don't use technology in quite the same way as teenagers and young adults do and hence are not immersed in the Web 2.0 culture.

As a response to the challenges that arose from the application of waterfall processes, many different approaches have been tried -- and many discarded. The agile software development methods are the result of taking "what worked" from many different processes and blending them together.

Companies merge for a variety of reasons. Alliances are usually made in the best interests of the organizations and their shareholders with the goal of maximizing the financial value of the merged company. The idea is that financial synergies, economies of scale, knowledge transfer, and tighter financial and operational controls will lead to increased shareholder wealth.

It is inevitable that your outsourcing contract will end one day, either as a result of reaching the natural end of its term or the end of the specified extension periods or through early termination.

Imagine you are standing in front of an orchestra of 75 musicians.

The accompanying Executive Report discusses the four stages of enterprise architecture (EA) maturity and describes methods used to identify potential standardized processes for evolving to the later stages of EA maturity as well as ways to develop a strategic model from business plans and ways to derive project

The agile approach is highly productive, and those who can develop and lead the environments in which it thrives are extremely valuable.

The accompanying Executive Report builds on an earlier Cutter report that discussed the 40 most common provisions required in any outsourcing contract.