Serious problems associated with IT system complexity have been around for a long time. However, with widespread usage of such systems, more and more end users and businesses started to speak out, some of them quite emphatically.

Many IT organizations are beginning to implement service-oriented architectures (SOAs), yet some

Part business, part IT, and part organizational science, collaboration is cropping up everywhere in organizations. As it is too hot to handle for any single department alone, it is bringing all parties to the discussion table. We are witnessing the pervasive emergence of "social software" and must learn how to incorporate this important trend in long-term organizational strategies.

The accompanying Executive Report provides an overview of executable acceptance test-driven development (EATDD), a software development methodology where automated tests are used to specify high-level functional requirements and drive the development.

An old saying about armed conflict states, "You never see the one that gets you." The same can be said of a variety of liability and compliance risks affecting businesses. One source of such risk is a company's IT operations. Virtually every commercial or government entity now runs its daily operations using computers and networks, maintains a Web site, and communicates with its customers, suppliers, and remote offices via e-mail.

Over the past 20 years, outsourcing has shaped Ireland's economic development. What began as a way for companies from abroad to manufacture IT products cheaply has developed during the last decade into something that is of far more value not only to the multinational companies but to Ireland itself: value-added services.

The Balanced Scorecard field has gone through two stages of development: a business indicators stage and a strategic modeling stage. The discipline has been remarkably successful in the sense that the Balanced Scorecard has been widely adopted and applied and that software tools for strongly supporting its first two stages are readily available and have benefited from vigorous competition. But there are at least five challenges facing the practice as follows:

Everyone in IT is talking about service-oriented architecture (SOA).

While commonplace today, only a few years ago social media technology, such as blogs, was strictly the province of hard-core geeks. But now, grandmothers, public relations flacks, and teenagers have joined the digerati, posting their political views, their cookie recipes, and their innermost thoughts on the newest boy band, and sharing these posts with friends, family, and the wide, wide world.

Corporate project portfolios are routinely challenged in many firms. Looking across the portfolio, the executive will often see projects that are late and overbudget, deliver poor value, and have less-than-satisfied business sponsors and end users.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs are notoriously prone to implementation difficulties. Many overrun their budgets, slip their schedules, disappoint their sponsors, or all of the above.

Why does your IT department outsource? Is it to achieve a reduced cost of IT services? Or is it to obtain best-in-class services? Does outsourcing improve the productivity and efficiency of the services you deliver? Does outsourcing increase IT's ability to help increase revenues? Does outsourcing make it easier to achieve compliance with regulatory requirements? Or is it all of the above?

Driven by the continued advances in, and widespread adoption of, mobile computing and wireless communications, a paradigm shift in computer usage and information access is emerging. Mobile devices, such as Pocket PCs, PDAs, notebooks, and smart mobile phones, offer powerful platforms for the delivery of new applications and services. When deployed to their full potential, they are expected to radically change the way people work, the way that enterprises operate, and the way members of society interact and live.

Imagine being asked to write a job announcement for one of the management/lead positions on your agile team. You understand that this person needs to have familiarity with the specific technology and with the preferred agile methodology but are struggling with getting the "right" person. How should this person act?

The past few years have highlighted many newly recognized operational threats resulting from weather, fraud, data loss, terrorism, and other events. With each incident, the level of loss was significant, but an underlying theme revealed the inability of organizations to survive the threats. Some of these situations were so catastrophic that recovery was very difficult, but the recovery could have been easier with prior planning. More significantly, these recent events will likely repeat themselves in some form or fashion.

Competitive bidding has been found to be the most common supplier selection technique for outsourcing, with most organizations using a tender (a request for proposal, or RFP) to see how the marketplace would respond to their needs. This approach not only puts pressure on suppliers to deliver their best value for the money against their peers, but it also gives the organization the information it needs to evolve and mature its selection decision-making process.

IT-enabled business transformations occur when technology is used to fundamentally alter the way business is conducted in an industry. The organization that successfully implements the industry-altering technology can gain a competitive advantage so profound that others in the industry can no longer compete and either go out of business or, upon implementing "me too" technologies, find regaining customers to be extremely difficult.

Two major elements behind the success of most enterprise-wide integration initiatives are: (1) establishing the right models to create and collect relevant data and maintain various parameters of enterprise architecture (EA) as a set of metrics; and (2) recognizing the significance of monitoring EA-related activities that emphasize the reality of those metrics.

The accompanying Executive Report focuses on the human factor in the business technology relationship. After asking how well you really know the people in your organization, the report takes a look at the important traits -- including the three types of knowledge -- that employees should have and how you should go about finding these types of people.

The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) is incomplete and evolving. However, it has reached a level of detail and prevalence within the US federal government that agencies are now developing or honing FEA-based enterprise architecture programs, and system development projects now include FEA considerations.

Complex enterprise-wide information systems (IS) packages are very popular today, and many organizations are implementing them in the hope that they will improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness. While the benefits can be significant, many organizations struggle to implement the selected system. Some organizations even bankrupt themselves during the process, while many more fail to fully exploit their systems and gain the expected benefits.

Whenever the performance of a project falls outside nominal values, it will be judged to be a project in distress and likely to fail unless some intervention strategy brings it back under control. How it got to that state is a question that needs answering. But more important is how it can be returned to a state of normalcy -- if at all.

Outsourcing contracts are difficult to prepare. Perhaps that explains why a recent Google search on "IT outsourcing contract" yielded 22.4 million results! Many books and articles on the subject are written by lawyers for lawyers, which makes the language inaccessible to the" legalese challenged," thus presenting a high risk of unintentional noncompliance by both parties. There are also many contracts you can buy sight unseen, which means their particular usefulness for your situation is unknown.

Negotiations with vendors present many challenges to buyers. Deciding what approach to take and how far you can push to get the best deal before you damage the relationship with the other party is not a simple task, especially in cases where the partners and suppliers are large, powerful organizations with whom you will need to negotiate and work in the future.

Most project and system failures occur as a result of miscommunication between business and IT. For example, Computerworld [1] recently described a failed application project for the Irish Health Service Executive that was budgeted originally at US $10.7 million for three years. Ten years and $180 million later (the price of a brand-new, 600-bed hospital), work on the project was halted.