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 efforts.

This is the final Executive Update in a three-part series exploring how firms can leverage the growing number of intermediaries, such as InnoCentive and YourEncore, to more effectively engage in crowdsourcing as a way to improve their innovation activities.

In current economic times, global outsourcing is somewhat in decline and the geography is changing. Cost and proximity factors are creating a more diverse marketplace, as different supplier countries refine their offerings for niche markets. In the emerging mix, Brazil is in an interesting and unique position.

Many enterprise architecture (EA) departments struggle with the transition of EA to projects. The issue is how to make sure that EA deliverables are actually used. The idea is simple: project start architecture (PSA) provides a relevant summary of EA artifacts to projects. The value of the PSA is to ensure that the results of each project will adhere to the overall architecture and blend with the IT landscape.

Every once in a while, it's therapeutic to vent.

The agile movement was founded on two key purposes: to deliver value to customers and to improve workplace satisfaction, making work more fun. Agile Software Development Ecosystems summarizes an interview with several agile founders, including Kent Beck:

Throughout the 1990s, many organizations gradually retired their homegrown legacy systems and replaced them with COTS equivalents. Large software vendors, such as Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft, saw their revenues and profits skyrocket as the dominoes fell.

A recent project of mine has been to improve the skills of a group of about 40 business analysts in a large insurance organization.

Cloud computing has arrived, is rapidly maturing, and is nearing a tipping point for some enterprise solution realms.

This is the second Executive Update in a three-part series exploring how organizations can use intermediaries to better engage in a particular (and somewhat peculiar) kind of open innovation -- solving problems by leveraging large, anonymous populations of potential innovators, an approach commonly known as crowdsourcing.

Have you suffered personal turmoil in applying conventional project management approaches only to fall short of expectations more often than you would like? Do you suspect that having successful projects under your belt is not quite enough to be a top-performing project manager? What more is required of today's project managers to evolve to the next level in a new decade?

As the world of technology continues to change, no software company can rest. To expand their products, firms purchase others. Not only will they expand their product set through such purchases, but they can now cross-sell -- to the customers of both companies. This opens new opportunities for the software vendor. But while it is great for the vendor, it creates new challenges for the customer.

In this Executive Update, I provide some insights toward applying the lean concept of limiting work in progress (WIP) in Kanban to balancing WIP at the product management level.

"Nine outsourcing contracts. Do we really have nine outsourcing contracts?" The news came as a shock and a real eye-opener. You could tell.

Things are changing -- again. But this time the changes are more profound and definitely more permanent. We're entering a new era of partnership between technology and business. These two camps are inseparable now, and business models and processes cannot be implemented without operational and strategic technology.

When Zhou Enlai, China's first communist prime minister, was asked his impression of the French Revolution of 1789, he is purported to have replied: "It's too early to say." His point, of course, was that to properly appreciate momentous events, you need to view them with sufficient historical perspective.

Corporate survival and growth depend on innovation to provide new products and new ways of doing business. Innovation cannot exist without risk, yet organizations must be risk-averse to survive in difficult times. This creates a paradox, as a key risk is the inability to innovate. The relationship between risk and opportunity is a difficult one. Risk presents both challenges and new possibilities.

Corporate enterprise architecture (EA) departments often have a hard time dealing with business units (BUs), even if it is clear that there are benefits in a centralized architecture and common solutions. BUs, pursuing their own targets, don't want to be bothered by central rules because these are perceived as restrictive in doing business.

For any central guidance to succeed, two conditions are important:

As leadership guru John Kotter notes, "More change always requires more leadership." Effective project managers cannot be reduced to merely what they know (e.g., certification) and do (e.g., processes). So what makes a great project leader?

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) continues to gain ground as a standard for IT governance, despite the current recession, and there have been significant changes to the standard in its upgrade from V2 to V3. Although ITIL V3 was officially launched in June 2007, adoption of the new version has lagged, and many organizations are remaining with V2. Uptake has been slowed particularly as a result of the ongoing economic crisis.

Last November, I enrolled in a training course to prepare for the The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) Version 9 examination. In this Executive Update, I would like to share my thoughts about TOGAF. 1

Computer-mediated collaboration has evolved considerably, yet the main tool we still use is e-mail, which started spreading more than 30 years ago when our needs were much simpler. Google's recent preview of its Google Wave has set the IT world abuzz, because we suddenly glimpsed a more logical (some said brilliant) way to escape the limitations of e-mail.

This is the first 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 its advantage over a 12-month period.

Over the past several years, two disruptive ideas about how firms can innovate (and subsequently create and capture value around innovations) have gained considerable momentum. The first idea is that of open innovation, which Henry Chesbrough defines as:

A meeting was held at Motorola near Chicago several years ago, and nobody came. Well, almost nobody -- one guy did turn up. It was a good meeting, and several important decisions were made. Sandeep in Bangalore, India, dialed in, and so did Pat in Cork, Ireland, and Yaron in Tel Aviv, Israel.