There has rightly been much focus of late on service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance and managing the risks of SOA.1 In this Executive Update, we explain how SOA -- properly done -- is in fact a powerful mechanism for managing both IT and business risks.

Corporate governance is the means by which accountability to stakeholders is ensured, yet organizations often fail at creating governance plans that align with the organizational context. They also fail at institutionalizing governance that spans levels and processes in the business, particularly in global, multicultural organizations. In this Executive Update, we introduce value-based adaptive models for business governance structure design, operational planning, and implementation for complex global organizations.

About three years ago, the term "Web 2.0" entered into public consciousness, first propagating through the blogosphere, then appearing in the mainstream business and technology media, and more recently on the agenda of a global research community. When it appeared, some greeted the term as a welcome lifeline in the postdot-bomb era; others dismissed it as marketing hype.

In October 2008, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 85 end-user organizations about their BI and data warehousing plans. The goal was to determine the degree to which companies are adopting various types of BI, data warehousing, and other analytic technologies and practices.

This is the second in a series of Executive Updates examining the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on the subject of open source Java frameworks (OSJFs).

Part II1 of this series of Executive Updates demonstrated the power of coupling agile methods with virtual appliance technology. Together, these two ingredients enable an operational model that allows software vendors to provide markets-of-one for select customers.

Such service-oriented factors as business capability, process networks, core competency, and collaboration in the global marketplace tend to be ignored in many business process management (BPM) projects. At the same time, a service-oriented paradigm shift in BPM is not practically possible for most organizations.

This Executive Update aims to present a framework for monitoring and maintaining information quality in data warehouses. The framework includes:

The definition of information quality assessment rule

Methods to enable, monitor, and maintain the assessment process

A generic logical data model to hold the assessment data

A sample presentation layer for information health

As the global economic situation continues to deteriorate, companies are becoming increasingly concerned about costs. Budgets for nonessentials must be cut. But it is important to make sure that money remains for the essentials. And one essential is ensuring a continuing flow of innovation.

With all due respect to Clint Eastwood and his fans, the IT workforce in early 2009 is clearly a mixture of the bad, the good, and the ugly. 1 I hope the juxtaposition of the film's title will have meaning as you read on. I have been following workforce trends since 2000 and decided it might be interesting to see how things were unfolding in the US as we entered the New Year.

Headlines in just about every city right now are about economic meltdown. While the economy still deserves top billing, the backstory to those headlines is about IT. The proposed solution to the meltdown is more standardization and regulation, forcing companies, organizations, and government to evolve their IT in a stressful situation. What would Darwin do? How did land-living animals evolve from fish? The transformation required in many companies is no less than the transformation from the fins of fish to the arms and legs of human ancestors.

Consider for a moment what would happen if you lost all your critical information.

Business-IT alignment is a broad vision that has been debated endlessly since the 1960s. It embraces a wide range of areas and, although other terminology has been suggested, the debate remains the same. The business environment continues to evolve and, as part of that evolution, the relationship between business and IT processes must also change.

Agile application development methods have demonstrated improved quality and timeliness of results, but they have not been successful in scaling to large projects. In large projects, the collaboration and agility of small teams are eroded. Because the effort is large, the number of people involved becomes large, and considerable attention must be given to coordination, consensus, and resolution of issues. Changes ripple through the development organization resulting in consequential effects and requiring planning and change control on a broad scale.

Open source BI (e.g., query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards) and data warehousing tools (e.g., data integration, data cleansing) have generated considerable industry buzz over the past few years. But the $64 million question remains: to what extent are end-user organizations actually adopting these tools to build and deploy BI and data warehousing applications?

In the first Executive Update of this two-part series, we discussed the challenges with existing size measures used to estimate the effort required to implement an enterprise solution product, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP). 1 Inaccurate effort estimation is often cited as one of the key reasons for time and cost overruns on such projects, but in the past, there has not been any standard framework to use to estimate the si

In the first two parts of this Executive Update series on Cutter's annual survey of innovation practices, we described the enterprise innovation chain (value innovation, management innovation, business model innovation, and invention) and identified key findings of the research. 1 Here in Part III, we present additional detailed characteristics of organizations that assess themselves as successful innovators, efficiently managing their innovation processes.

Part I of this two-part Executive Update series took you through the core competencies of the first phase of the outsourcing lifecycle: the architect phase. 1 The architect phase is where the deal is put together in a strategic sense, cumulating in the detailed contract, the

New Year's resolutions are annoying. Most of us make them and break them almost immediately. Is it easier to make professional New Year's resolutions, or will they, like all the personal ones we make every year, fall victim to the same forces that derail our best intentions?

This is the first of a series of Executive Updates that examines the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on the subject of open source Java frameworks (OSJF). Here in Part I, I look at the reasons behind the recent surge in popularity of OSJF, which mostly arise from dissatisfaction with enterprise Java.

It's something of an age-old question: are IT projects, particularly those that involve significant software development, intrinsically different from other types of project? Over the years, people have argued two sides of the story. One camp says that IT projects involve tasks, resources, and processes the same as any other project. The other camp focuses on software development as a highly intellectual activity that is all about people.

"May you live in interesting times" is an ironic Chinese curse about to be experienced by more than a few CIOs in the US. Our truly terrifying current economic climate is sure to impact IT organizations profoundly as organizations call on business units to do more, maybe far more, with less. In the name of sound IT management, CIOs are reminded to consider the most common sources of technology management failures that happen in the good times because in bad times like these, managerial vulnerabilities are often magnified.

BI and data warehousing have moved way beyond basic extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL), as well as canned reporting. The trend today is for companies to apply BI techniques across the organization in a variety of formats.

This Executive Update looks at debriefing the bidders after a competitive bidding process has closed. This is often treated as an optional process -- and is usually one to be avoided. However, if done well, with the right intent, it is a valuable exercise for all bidders (unsuccessful and successful) and can also create support for your future bidding opportunities.

As the IT outsourcing environment continues to evolve, new demands are being placed on management to improve and refine sourcing policies and governance. During the past several years, there has been a steady move from contracts managing large facilities aimed at cost reduction toward smaller contracts that focus on providing expertise and efficiency around noncore processes of the business.