Governance just ain't what it used to be.

Event analysis is a counterintuitive but "easy to understand and use" approach for designing or redesigning processes and systems. If used consistently and extensively, it simplifies architectures, increases structural parallelism, identifies needed controls, and expedites the eventual enhancements of applications, middleware, and operating systems.

Innovation has never been more important to business survival. The ever-quickening pulse of business shortens the time in which a new product or process can be of value and increases the number of new ideas that must be in the pipeline. At the same time, continued focusing on core competency has reduced the diversity of internal resources, and limited funding has resulted in a need for greater efficiency.

Agile software development involves people working together, across disciplines, to deliver business value efficiently. While the Agile Manifesto states that agile development values "responding to change over following a plan" and "working software over documentation," that does not mean plans are not important. A plan allows you to measure your progress, focus your efforts, or, more important, present a target that stakeholders can invest in.

This is the final Executive Update in a three-part series discussing three approaches by which organizations, particularly commercial firms, can leverage virtual worlds to create and capture value.

In Part I, 1 I looked at the history of virtual worlds and defined three possible strategies. Very briefly, they are:

The aim of this Executive Update is to connect the approaches of architects and project managers in the field of IT development. Both areas of expertise have matured over time, mostly in a disconnected way, while sharing the aim of delivering IT solutions that fit their purposes. During each project period, various architecture artifacts direct the development of the IT solution. In this Update, we show how these artifacts are linked, how they connect to the project management artifacts, and how explicit connections can increase successful project delivery.

You may hear people say that BI, as we know it, is "dead." Rather than dead, BI is likely to have a renewed lease on life. As Tim O'Reilly writes:

We're moving from a world in which analysts and executives study data and make decisions to a world in which analysts study data and rewrite algorithms that make decisions.1

Does your organization possess a reference model for EA that goes beyond the tired, old organization chart? Traditionally, most models of EA organization have been predicated on the view of IT as a support function, as reflected in the ubiquitous organization chart showing "Architecture," in one form or another, usually either reporting to the CIO or CTO.

This Executive Update, the final in a four-part series,1 is about negotiating an outsourcing contract with a longtime business partner. Unexpectedly, that which has been a relationship built on trust must be converted into an arm's-length, formalized contractual agreement.

Many years ago, I tore a page from a newspaper and framed it (see below).

Who is, and who should be, responsible for carbon management within a corporation? As climate change relentlessly seeps into the public consciousness, and corporations face increasingly widespread and intense pressure to adhere to regulatory requirements and demonstrate their civic virtuosity by contributing to the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, the question of where accountability of carbon management should lie has become a subject of growing interest within the C-suite.

Home entertainment is undergoing a revolution. We are in the midst of a multimedia content insurgency fueled by people creating, sharing, and watching video online. There is no longer any need to set your recorder or even wait for a DVD release, since all your favorite programs are online, and at the click of a button, they can be streamed to a TV, computer, or mobile device at your convenience.

This is the first in a series of three Executive Updates that examines enterprise architecture (EA), its organization and programs, practices used, and the effectiveness of EA, all based on a recent Cutter Consortium survey.

Everyone wants to innovate. But most companies are terrible at invention, innovation, and entrepreneurialism. Many companies talk a good game -- "we're an innovation culture" -- but in fact they're pitifully staid and innovate mostly in the past; that is, toward business models, processes, and technologies that are anchored solidly in the 20th century.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) has become well established in recent years, and the areas it encompasses continue to grow. Beginning with call centers and IT (via facilities management), BPO has expanded to include financial transactions, HR, and a wide range of industry processes. Today, there are moves to bring outsourced processes together in a manner somewhat like IT facilities management but applied to such areas as finance and HR.

In a global economy that is hesitantly emerging from recession, organizations continue to strive to respond to the financial difficulties while delivering excellence for their customers. In this climate, core/context business strategy takes center stage.

In my previous Executive Updates -- "Relating Business Analysis to Enterprise Architecture"1 and "Business Analysis in the Information Age: Mapping to an SFIA Skill Set"2 -- I extended and described two important

This Executive Update provides an abridged section from my upcoming book, Supply Chain Management: The Real WOW Factor, covering the critical business planning process. It delves into the key steps of planning to transform how MIS, supply chain, sales, and product line executives work together to win with customers and consumers while improving top- and bottom-line results.

Consider for a moment what impressed you most about Apple's new iPad. Was it some fancy feature? Its compact design? Or perhaps a cool application? I must confess that I was most fascinated by none of these. What most impressed me was what the iPad did not have.

The risk environment continues to grow in complexity as ever-increasing amounts of information become available to a growing array of processing and storage facilities on a rapidly diversifying range of devices. Complexity is fostered by the following:

The growth of silos of protection, where areas of infrastructure or processes have evolved their own security and risk management processes

The Japanese government considers some practitioners so skilled and talented that they are subsidized and honored as "living national treasures." The US government and its Department of Defense consider the current domestic science and technical human capital pipeline a national security issue. Ensuring that critical skills endure has leaped onto the agenda of national policy makers and senior business decision makers.

There are ways to make decisions and ways to avoid them. We tend to avoid decisions that make people unhappy or -- worse -- really angry. We do this for obvious reasons: careers can be shortened if we step on the wrong political mines.

Surveys of CEO strategic priorities consistently place innovation near the top.1 However, innovation is synonymous with change, and lower levels of management, especially seasoned managers, know that change can be expensive and disruptive. In product development, changes late in a project usually mean serious schedule and budget overruns.

This Executive Update focuses on a specific vision of IT: right-time and right-scale delivery of right IT services to the right person at the right place. This view appears to be on solid ground today and is moving toward dramatic increases of acceptance. Consequently, two revolutionary trends are coming to the forefront as this vision takes hold of the people in command: enterprise IT and personal IT.