Sometimes you get lucky. For the better part of my career, I have been a researcher, consultant, and teacher. Teaching, I find, gives me the most short-term fun, because I get immediate feedback. I think that I learn more when I am consulting, because I'm constantly faced with solving problems in real time. And researching gives me some perspective and ties everything together.

Be honest. How well are you managing your compliance to technical regulations, requirements, policies, and procedures?

The applicability of statistical process control (SPC) to software development has been debated since 1989, when the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) endorsed its use in the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Proponents of the use of SPC techniques in software grasped how powerful the techniques could be beyond traditional manufacturing processes.

Back in the 1970s, there was a very popular show called "Happy Days," starring Ron Howard and Henry Winkler, who played Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli. Five years into the series, an episode aired in which Fonzie is shown improbably water skiing and jumping a shark to show his bravery.

Recently, I was having a short exchange with Dr. Ken Calvert, chair of our computer science department at University of Kentucky. The topic was relational databases. The question: are they relevant anymore? Do we need still need to teach formal means of describing, searching, and using information?

Recent media coverage of BP and the spill in the Gulf of Mexico reveals that BP's management decisions and actions have been dominated by cost considerations. Rather than taking lower-risk actions or investing in better solutions, BP apparently took the low road. The low-cost road, that is. We in IT of course are very familiar with this.

Several forces are converging in the industry to spotlight the idea of architecture certification. First, EA has become a commonly accepted practice. As the complexity of IT continues to increase, so does the need for architecture. Yet, few organizations really understand what EA is, how to apply it, or what an architect does.

A lot of advice has been given about the "how" and "why" of agile. Yet, in human resources (HR), there is still a need for an internal push on several counts. What would enable HR to create and support an agile environment? First, the ability to let go of all the earlier beliefs about people's functions and requirements, and second, a move to experiencing and understanding the agile employee from a different paradigm.

Due to the depressed economy, many companies have sought to streamline processes and reduce staff, leaving many compliance organizations leaner while new regulations and updates to existing regulations continue.

Based on our research over the past few years, it's apparent that the need to consolidate disparate data warehouses and data marts has become an ongoing trend among organizations wanting to upgrade their BI capabilities.

There are good reasons to step back and assess where we are as an organization in our adoption of agile (or any other process model). Executives should concern themselves with these questions:

We've spent a lot of money and political capital on agile. Where are we in terms of our capability? Are we still at a beginner level organizationally, or are we fairly mature now?

What percentage of our teams are at an advanced level of practice?

Back in March, I discussed some of the important developments involving the incorporation of social computing techniques (i.e., blogs, wikis, social networks) with enterprise software (see "Facebook for the Enterprise: The New Business

And the winning numbers are:

16 ... 8 ...

Enterprise architecture continues to grow as a job title, but what does it mean to make the transition from just a title to an actual profession?

Security and privacy challenges are growing and will more than likely become a central focus for CEOs and CIOs during this next decade. Most IT organizations have been dealing with challenges in this area for many years; however, the level of risk continues to escalate as our cyberworld becomes more and more complex.

Last month (see "Corporate Use of Text Analysis and Mining Grows," 25 May 2010), I wrote that organizations are showing more interest in using text analysis and mining tools to support their BI efforts.

In Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins discusses the difference between cooperation and collaboration. I'd like to add another interaction dimension to these two: compliance.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote an article for IEEE Software called "Are We Developers Liars or Just Fools?" (July 1995).

Vendor management is still the rage. We talked about it a lot when outsourcing trends became clear -- when more and more companies were outsourcing a greater amount of their infrastructure and applications to partners down the street and around the world. The major outsourcing deals of the 20th century were inked in the 1990s.

In the earlier Advisor in this series ("A Sustainability Strategy That BITES — Creating an Actionable Agenda: Part I," 2 June 2010), I outlined the need for a business, IT, and environmental sustainability (BITES) strategy and discussed what green IT means and how IT (besides itself being green) as an effective tool or means could help in many different ways to enhance enterprise environmental sustainability.

"In the absence of a long-range plan, short demands will always drive out long-term needs."

The possible negative impact of mishandling digital assets is rising as assorted government and industry regulations crack down on lax organizations. It is no longer just a matter of direct cost of the damage done by a breach; it now includes legal costs in the form of fines and possible prosecution.

Outsourcing is closely tied to an IT organization's staffing plans. Overall, our survey of IT managers suggests that outsourcing is up. In fact, the trend for outsourcing appears to have really caught on. The number of respondents who outsource work now or plan to outsource jumped to 71% in this year's survey. That's up by about 13% from the 2009 survey.

There have been a number of recent developments pertaining to the use of MapReduce1 and its open source equivalent, Hadoop.2 These developments are important because they should help spur greater use of MapReduce and Hadoop by traditional enterprises looking to take advantage of their big data assets by implementing applications that can rapidly process vast amounts of dat