In the first of this two-part Executive Update series,1 I took a swipe at the currently accepted approach to systems development. My argument was that if a system is to adequately support a business, the information it handles must be rigorously derived from the business itself.

This Executive Update touches on a solution for recording and maintaining the data lineage for decision support systems (DSSs). The aim is to increase the effectiveness and pace of impact analysis for enhancements and root-cause analysis of data issues. The solution explores the idea of connecting ETL and BI metadata via a custom-built metadata repository provisioning an end-to-end view of data from upstream to downstream.

Organizations increasingly rely on relationships with vendors, partners, and service providers to better manage their businesses. Lean economic times help accelerate the outsourcing trend, and the software as a service (SaaS) market is experiencing double-digit growth as businesses seek to avoid costly acquisition costs and financial commitments of supporting a full-system lifecycle. The rapid growth in SaaS, cloud computing, and offshoring continues to move information security risks from inside the enterprise to outside.

You'll likely decide to make the transition to agile if there is a compelling business objective for doing so. Reasons may include decreased time to market, higher quality, increased employee engagement, better use of each dollar invested, or greater focus on delivering what your customers need.

Nearly four years ago, Tim O'Reilly offered up a "compact definition" of Web 2.0. He wrote that it is:

Mashups are lightweight integrations of one or more Web applications used to create a synergistic result, with the outcome often delivered through the Web.

Use of virtual teams in an agile development environment has always been controversial. Many consider that the close communications required to enable development methodologies such as Scrum are simply impossible to achieve with virtual teams.

Compared with other areas of the enterprise, human resources (HR) has been the "weak kid on the block" when it comes to the application of BI analytics.

Aristotle summed up the general principle of holism in Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." The opposite view -- that a complex system is no more than the sum of its component parts -- is known as reductionism.

The gap between what the business requires and what IT delivers is well recognized. The premise of this two-part Executive Update series is that although approaches such as enterprise architecture go some way toward closing this gap, a fundamental problem remains with the way systems are specified and delivered.

What do you know about Ada Lovelace? You might know that she was the only child of the poet Lord Byron -- actually, her biography says the only legitimate child (apparently, the lord was quite a philanderer). You might also know that Ada Lovelace was the very first software programmer.

It's no secret that these are tough times. Technology budgets are being slashed over and over again. CFOs are running wild, attacking every budget that cannot be justified logically, financially, and politically. If the ROI is not bulletproof, it's not real.

Design notations, such as UML, and long-lived design documents have at least one advantage: if you're overseeing the work of a software team, they are tangible, auditable deliverables that allow you to assess the team's design practices. You may, however, find this assessment more difficult to make if you're dealing with an agile team. For one thing, there is a widespread perception that agile approaches frown on documentation and prefer direct communication -- which leaves no written trace.

The classic business case focuses on projects, portfolios, and strategies. Each of these initiatives is assessed with reference to value, cost, and risk. Or you can use SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, if you like.

Business process management (BPM) is a business science applied by organizations to evaluate various aspects of how work is completed. Today, the term implies incorporating methods based on technology and nontechnology for completing that work. This term is also used by some vendors to describe new and/or updated products that provide automated workflow technology, for the most part, within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This Executive Update discusses a decision framework for evaluating BPM technologies.

Despite the branding, business process management (BPM) is actually not a new initiative but has evolved out of previous generations of both technology and practices. In this Executive Update, we examine the evolution of BPM using graphical examples.

Every organization uses software applications to support its business processes. Some organizations buy, some build, and some rent software as a service (SaaS). Buying and integrating proprietary applications are sometimes complicated by M&A activity; acquired or merged organizations often use different applications and systems than their new owners. CIOs facing this type of problem should think long and hard when considering integrating disparate applications.

We all know by now that the relationship between the parties of an outsourcing contract is paramount to the success of the deal. While there is a fair bit of advice out there, it is mainly process-orientated (e.g., communicate frequently, plan together, have improvement workshops). But what if you genuinely do not like your counterpart on the other side?

It may not be a simple personality clash with which you have to live. It could just be that your opposite number holds very different values from yours when it comes to managing contracts.

Recruiting is an important and sometimes overlooked portion of the IT portfolio. Its functions orchestrate the talent available to the firm and ensure that the right people with the right training are available to perform the jobs required for the firm to succeed. The processes falling within this area affect both the IT department and the corporation at large.

Imagine you and I are building a house without drawings or specifications, instead relying on various tradespeople to use their experience to build what we have in mind. So the concreter lays the slab where he think is best, given his experience; the plumber puts the piping where she thinks it should go. The electrician wires the house as he deems it should be, and so on.

The capabilities delivered by BI technologies, which provide computational power, speed, and capacity, do not always address and resolve the issues derived from the lack of interoperability of disparate data sets.

It has become increasingly evident that companies that fail to establish adequate innovation processes are likely to suffer in the current recession. As economic conditions bite deeper into revenues from existing products, new products will not be available to replace them, and ultimately, the company will fall behind the competition.

One of the greatest strengths of agile methodologies is that exploratory techniques involving collaboration between people -- the very fabric of software development -- take center stage. At the same time, from a service-oriented point of view, rigor is needed in specifying services and the components used to implement them.

This is the fifth and last of a series of Executive Updates in which I have been presenting and interpreting the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on the subject of open source Java frameworks (OSJFs).

Consider this: if you could upgrade all the software on your computer for free, would you do it? It's not a trick question -- give it some thought for a moment. I posed the question at a forum in Chicago earlier this year, and some of the responses were quite intense. That was not what I had expected.