It is clear that India is one of the powerhouse countries of this century. Its large and diverse population of highly skilled, business-savvy workers makes it an attractive business partner. And companies are increasingly entering into business arrangements in India. However, many are finding that doing business in India is not as simple as signing contracts and producing products.

ar·chi·tec·ture (n) 4. What you need to know to build.

That very simple definition of architecture was provided to me by a mentor some 25 years ago and has helped me keep my head on straight through the barrage of concepts and models claiming to be architectures.

Agent technology is now necessary to reduce costs; to improve efficiency and effectiveness; and to support the requirements of individuals, groups, companies, and universities as they collaborate globally.

The ultra-competitive nature of today's business world is driving companies to optimize the processes that impact their financial and operational performance. As a result, many companies are seeking to apply performance-driven management techniques to streamline their day-to-day business operations and facilitate better decisions across the organization.

A popular trend in project management is the establishment of a project support office (PSO), aka a project management office. In the accompanying Executive Report, we offer a primer on the PSO.

The ever-increasing complexity of the enterprise security environment is fast creating a requirement to centralize and unify the security infrastructure so that it can be more easily managed, loopholes can be closed, and regulatory requirements can be met.

Sourcing is moving rapidly up the value chain from the outsourcing and offshoring of common, low-value, but important, processes such as those found in IT, tech support, HR administration, and inbound customer service calls to R&D, product development, drug development, and logistics. No longer just outsourcing or offshoring, "strategic sourcing" represents a new frontier of enterprise opportunity fraught with much risk as organizations grope for answers.

Privacy is essential to maintaining good relationships with customers, employees, and business partners.

A growing number of enterprises are outsourcing many of their IT activities to offshore locations, gaining significant benefits and improving their competitiveness, and we expect this trend to continue. But achieving success in offshoring is not automatic; offshoring poses additional challenges and risks, and enterprises must adopt sound strategies and good practices in order for their offshoring initiatives to achieve the desired results.

Certain business circumstances arise that reveal traditional project management's limitations. For instance, an organization may face a critical business objective that requires the execution of a number of IT projects. Instead of managing the planning, execution, and completion in isolation, the organization should implement a new concept in IT management that coordinates project management functions and drives measurably stronger alignment between strategic goals and the technology supporting them.

In an increasing number of organizations, business architecture is now on the front burner. It is not enough these days for CIOs to just focus on the management of their enterprise's complex technological environments. Indeed, today, CIOs need to be more strategic and transformational.

Open source business intelligence software is beginning to come of age, not so much as competition to the major BI platforms but instead as market enhancement.

The distributed nature of projects in today's workplace deprives project managers of many of the traditional, authoritative management tools that were common not too long ago. In the past, staff working on a given project reported to and were accountable to the same organization as the project manager. The project staff all worked for the same department in the same company, were colocated with the project manager and with each other, and worked with each other on projects over a long period of time.

Web 2.0, the second phase in the evolution of the Web, is the current hot buzzword. Web 2.0 is about harnessing the potential of the Web in a more interactive and collaborative manner with an emphasis on social interaction. The ability to recognize new technologies for their business potential, invent creative solutions, and implement those solutions is the key to success in this competitive global marketplace.

Welcome to 2007. It promises to be another exciting and busy year in architecture. To start the year off, in the accompanying Executive Report, we examine the trends we can expect in enterprise architecture (EA) this year. To that end, we've assembled a collection of articles from Cutter Senior Consultants on some of the more important topics. We've divided our look ahead into four main topic areas: more of the same; struggling to see value; bigger and better; and new demands.

Of all the enterprise architectures, data architecture is perhaps the most mature. This is in large part because data is the most valuable of all the IT assets and because data and data management have been viewed as a central resource the longest.

An important characteristic of many agile methodologies in use today is that they emphasize the need for continuous user participation. Users are expected to be regularly available -- even dedicated -- to the IS project and to be colocated with the development team. The user role is critical to the success of these projects.

Every organization applies its own nuances to the implementation of business practices. Be it individual leadership style or regulatory mandate, unique interpretations of what's required lead to unique applications of practice. Risk management is no exception.

Successful outsourcing arrangements cannot be guaranteed by virtue of have a signed contract alone. The contract is a necessary but not sufficient governance tool for outsourcing.

How do you transition in your role as information technology (IT) manager to a strategic business leader within your organization? The accompanying Executive Report examines today's business realities that define a new role for IT within the corporation and discusses a paradigm for greater integration between the information and business goals of companies.

Business reference models (BRMs) are becoming a major tool that large organizations use to help them rapidly understand the current business processes, benchmark themselves against industry (global) best practices, and reengineer their businesses. BRMs provide a new kind of framework for looking at an organization's value chains, value streams, and major business processes without having to engage in full-blown, time-consuming business process modeling activities.

Modern CIOs face tremendous pressure from customers for everything from ensuring infrastructure applications are reliable and easy to use to finding ways of doing more with less. The accompanying Executive Report focuses on an important emerging trend in complex enterprise software systems: embedded business intelligence (BI). This trend has the potential to dramatically alter the IT landscape and the pressures faced by the average CIO.

The agile movement is now more than five years old, and many organizations have implemented agile methods, with many more planning agile transitions. Previous surveys have addressed questions about how organizations are using agile methods or what particular flavor of agile is being used, but we thought it was time to ask a different question: how agile are organizations today?

Think of all the planning, resource allocation, and tactical decisions managers face in building a more effective information security management system (ISMS). And complexity scales with the size of an organization; just identifying all the assets that require risk mitigation protection can represent a major undertaking. Organizations should seriously consider building a planning and decision-making methodology as the chief vehicle for transporting themselves from ISMS mediocrity to excellence.

Today, third-party costs make up the majority of most IT budgets. In order to get the biggest bang for our company's buck, the accompanying Executive Report argues that a value-based model is necessary. A value-based model focuses on vendor relationships and partnerships, including how to develop and maintain them.