Much has been argued about the value of architecture, but actual proof is generally lacking. As for solution architecture, recent quantitative research has confirmed that this approach not only helps reduce throughput time and budget for IT projects but also leads to a reduction of variance in time and budget, indicating that bringing solution architecture to a project can be viewed as a quality improvement process in line with Six Sigma thinking.

In February and March 2010, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 99 end-user organizations about their various data warehousing, BI, and other analytic technologies and practices. One set of questions sought to determine corporate adoption and usage trends for high-performance analytic databases.1

Have you ever noticed a team and thought -- that's a good team? What is it that makes them good? Smart people? Dedicated people? Knowledgeable people? All of the above? Actually, the most important quality is none of the above.

As social networking and Web 2.0 applications continue to enter the workplace and rise in importance, it is crucial to be aware that they bring new risks along with new opportunities. Although relatively few companies have as yet introduced strong codes for using these applications, the risks of unrestricted access are beginning to become apparent.

This is the first Executive Update in a three-part series discussing the variety of ways in which organizations, particularly commercial firms, are leveraging virtual worlds to create and capture value. In this Update, I lay out the conceptual foundation for the discussion.

This is the second in a series of Executive Updates about how the management unit of a nonprofit organization, finding itself faced with a problematic IT function, turned adversity to advantage over a 12-month period.

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.

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

Wikipedia tells us about enterprise architecture:

The resignation of Intrigue's CTO six weeks before v1.0 of its JavaJoe product was scheduled to ship caused quite a few eyebrows to be raised. 1 While the resigning CTO indicated he was leaving to pursue an opportunity he could not afford to miss, the timing of his resignation gave rise to concerns about the readiness (or lack of it) of JavaJoe to be released as an enterprise application.

Cutter Consortium was called into a software organization by its venture capital firm to conduct a Technical Debt Assessment and Valuation. The code to be evaluated had been acquired two years prior. Until the organization built the capability to develop the code in its US headquarters, the development had continued through an outsourcing company in another country. The assessment came just as the company was about to release ~200K lines of Java code.

This Executive Update provides an abridged section of my upcoming book, Supply Chain Management: The Real WOW Factor, covering the critical strategy engagement process. I have modified it in the context of the CIO's and CTO's important role to ensure they partner with supply chain management (SCM) leaders in developing total end-to-end business processes and systems supporting the product-line strategies of their respective companies.

Let me suggest that while the technologies of the Semantic Web are relatively easy, semantics are hard. Pragmatics -- a deeper cognitive understanding of the unique context, perspective, and intent of an individual interacting with the Internet -- represents an even greater challenge.

In my last Executive Update, "Enterprise Software Vendors: The State of the Union," 1 I examined the emerging competition for the high-margin business of supporting enterprise applications. In this Update, it's time to look toward the future of enterprise software.

Part I of this two-part Executive Update series showed how cloud computing is maturing to become commoditized across multiple solution and service domains. 1 Here in Part II, we discuss how the CIO of tomorrow becomes a concierge for information services, considers the full breadth of cloud business use case

Innovation factories may be characterized as entities whose central function is to encourage, develop, and disseminate innovation through application of some regular process or organization. Innovation factories exist across all industries, though many currently focus on specific areas.

Recall a moment in history: The decisions embodied in the plan were being executed. By the time a seemingly sacrosanct decision was reversed, military casualties exceeded 10,000, as many civilians died from forced evacuation and the starvation that followed. The plan might have ended World War II by Christmas of 1944. Yet Operation Market Garden fell far short of its objectives. It became known as "A Bridge Too Far." 1

Everyone would like to have craftsman-level quality, but few are willing to devote the time or spend the money craftsmanship requires. Craftsmen working in hard goods, such as leather or silver, mitigate these factors by using devices such as patterns or molds that they can use to quickly replicate a high-quality design many times over. They have built these patterns based on their past experience. They've "materialized" experience into a tool.

In the first of this two-part Executive Update series, we discussed the purpose and the contents of the project start architecture (PSA).1 Here in Part II, we discuss some specific situations and provide examples.

The standard ISO/IEC 42010:2007 provides a generally accepted definition of architecture:

As a conceptual tool, enterprise architecture (EA) can assist IT organizations with their understanding of their own structure and the way it works. To begin applying EA concepts within an IT organization, an EA content framework has been defined with various models that describe the enterprise architecture. This framework defines a set of models along four dimensions:1

"You heard me right. They said they'd do the project for $1!" Those were the startling words from a friend who headed up an outsourcing practice. He had called to commiserate about the recent loss of a project his company was bidding on. It was a few years ago now, but I still remember it clearly.

As the 21st century proceeds, we are entering an era where basic assumptions about business organization and employment are evolving. This is resulting in a number of fundamental changes to expectations and skills requirements. People entering the workforce will need new sets of skills and new ways of working. This will be true across all business sectors, but the impacts within IT are likely to be profound.

I recently bought a new car. It's a Volkswagen Jetta, and it was made in Mexico. Not all of it -- most of it. Many of the parts were made in Germany, China, Hungary, the US, and several other countries. It's getting increasingly difficult these days to nail down the country of origin when you buy a new car.

It may seem like IT is the culprit of many problems, including data integration for the enterprise, but the issue may very well be something upper management brought on itself. Each year, IT is asked to do more with fewer resources such as hardware and software. People are also reduced every year because IT is seen as overhead in many organizations. So to balance things out, some applications are outsourced to another company. By outsourcing applications, more complexity is introduced into the IT group or any enterprise project.