The blogosphere and, increasingly, the media are humming with excitement about Web 2.0. But what lies behind this catchy new buzzword, and does it really represent a step forward from the "old" Web? Even enthusiasts do not agree on just what defines a "Web 2.0 site," and when they brainstorm the question, the resulting feature lists can grow to remarkable lengths.

It has always been the case that as an organization gets bigger and more diverse, it becomes progressively harder for separate groups to communicate with each other. In the modern age, however, it has become increasingly more important not only for people from different departments to work together, but also for their systems to work together.

Agile software techniques fundamentally shook the software development industry by changing not only the practices of software development, but also our understanding of how to think about the process in the first place. This shift has taken a firm hold in the industry due to the significant results reported by those successfully implementing agile methods, including greater productivity, improved quality, higher morale, and products more aligned with market needs.

Technological advances in the past 30 years have triggered fundamental changes in business practices. In the past, responsibility for completing a mission and the resources needed to pursue it neatly aligned along organizational boundaries. However, a one-to-one alignment among missions and project teams is no longer as common as it used to be.

Offshoring and risk are inextricably bound together, but many offshoring initiative failures are avoidable if organizations take the first step to understand those risks. Comprehension of the nature of those risks is the necessary first step in mitigating them and is a process that, it turns out, is quite easy.

There are good reasons not to analyze the ROI of security-related technology. First, the value of security technology is reminiscent of an insurance policy since you experience its true value only when something bad happens. Consequently, its benefits are the costs avoided in not falling victim to the various security threats lurking in the ether -- benefits that can be difficult to quantify. Second, regulations and laws have a way of influencing investment behavior.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is inherently a collaborative activity in which the buyer and vendor are equally well served by creating a partnership rather than a rigid "utility modeled" relationship in which the only concerns are payment, measurement, and specific service.

The mobile revolution has just begun, yet mobile phone ownership is already at near saturation levels in many countries. The key drivers of this mobile revolution are: the grand convergence of computing and communications in a small device; wireless connectivity; and the ability to integrate voice, data, and multimedia.

Enterprise architecture (EA) has taken on renewed importance in the past few years. Yet this is in contrast to the fact that EA has largely had a history of failure to deliver on promised value. Much of this disappointment can be traced to a lack of alignment with business drivers and requirements. As enterprise architects, it is incumbent upon us to understand and address these failures and to deliver value that aligns with business goals.

Business process management (BPM), also called business process modeling, is a hot topic these days: as a standalone solution; as the impetus for the customer relationship management and supply chain management categories; and perhaps most importantly, as a critical enabling technology for the orchestration function in service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Results of a recent BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group survey show that 72% of the senior executives in the survey named innovation as one of their top three priorities [3]. But there is a big gap between wanting innovation and creating the environment in which innovation can flourish.

Business is increasingly moving toward a marketplace model. This model is in sharp contrast to the traditional view of an organization as a production line. In this new world, organizations collaborate together, consuming and offering services to maximize efficiency, better serve customers, and achieve long-term advantage. This is the world of service orientation, in which business is increasingly less supported by software and more enabled by it.

In the midst of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) hype, there is a critical need to navigate corporate IT between the threats of overpromise and underdelivery.

Grasping the basic concepts of business rules and how a rule-based system (RBS) works offers benefits for every citizen of the information society, as the impact of RBSs on our daily lives is becoming greater by the day.

How can companies survive in our globally changing and demanding marketplace? Is it possible to reach target windows with the right products and services while meeting quality standards in a fluid and shifting environment? Can you truly embrace change without devolving into chaos? Is it possible to welcome change? The answer to all these questions is a resounding yes, but only if you can lead change rather than react to it after the need to change has become painfully obvious.

In 2002, Cutter Consortium conducted its first comprehensive survey of the state of risk management practice in the IT community [1]. The survey found that some 86% of organizations responding claimed they were practicing risk management, and 51% of those were practicing it in a disciplined, formal manner. From reports in general software literature, surveys on risk management and its relationship to capturing lessons learned, anecdotal experience, and so on, the practice of risk management seems to have grown both generally and in formality over the past four years.

That most outsourcing deals have a contract is a well-known fact, and the purpose of contracts, as many people will tell you, is to protect the parties in the event of litigation. However, if contracts are useful documents designed to help you in court, then there is one type of document helpful in keeping your outsourcing deal out of court to begin with -- the service-level agreement (SLA).

Free and open source software (F/OSS) is now acknowledged as an important contributor to the global software industry. Although Linux -- probably the most widely recognized F/OSS brand -- has so far attained only about 10% of the worldwide server market, a handful of F/OSS packages have quietly overtaken the market leaders in their respective segments.

You're probably thinking, the last thing our industry needs is another article about IT organizations being out of sync with their companies. In the past decade, there have been countless articles written about this problem, known as IT-business alignment or what I like to call the "IT-business disconnect."

Business processes are the muscle of any organization's operations and thus merit preeminent attention if enterprises want to be more cost-effective, productive, agile, and therefore technologically future-proof and competitive in the long run. Enter business process management (BPM). BPM is more than a technology; it's also a process. It manages multistep, long-lived transactions and messages through processes that span multiple applications, departments, and organizations.

The challenge facing today's project manager is how to organize a number of independent teams with potentially disparate cultures into a cohesive unit. Each team has its own set of tools, templates, and processes, which it claims are the best. Should the project manager let each team do its own thing, or is some integration of tools, templates, and processes needed? The temptation will be to let each team act on its own with some integrating task at the end to "glue" everything together.

In 2002, Cutter Consortium conducted its first comprehensive survey of the state of risk management practice in the IT community [1]. The survey found that some 86% of organizations responding claimed they were practicing risk management, and 51% of those were practicing it in a disciplined, formal manner. From reports in general software literature, surveys on risk management and its relationship to capturing lessons learned, anecdotal experience, and so on, the practice of risk management seems to have grown both generally and in formality over the past four years.

There are two parallel trends in the field of IT that try to address the expense associated with developing quality software. The first is the adoption of various agile software development methodologies, such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum, and the second is the trend to outsource software development offshore to countries where wages are significantly less than in the US.