In today's world of increased competition, tightening finances, and fewer windows of opportunity, the need for innovation has never been greater. There is no time for the slow and thoughtful evolution of ideas. In order to respond to quickly changing market conditions and volatile environmental factors, what is required are dramatically new ideas, out-of-the-box thinking, and game-changing solutions.

In today's world of increased competition, tightening finances, and fewer windows of opportunity, the need for innovation has never been greater. There is no time for the slow and thoughtful evolution of ideas.

Today, enterprise resource planning (ERP) is used more to drive business improvements and the operational efficiency of organizations, and any delays or budget overruns in implementing projects could affect the business. In enterprise solutions projects where such package implementations and rollouts are carried out, an inaccurate effort estimate is said to be one of the key causes of significant time and cost overruns. Hence, estimating the effort with reasonable accuracy is crucial for successful implementation of the package.

Achieving intelligence depends on the ability to query, interpret, and generally "make sense" of growing amounts of information and data stored in repositories.

The rapid growth of the software as a service (SaaS) market, along with the closely related cloud computing industry, is attracting a proliferation of players that is creating a buyer's market for customers and raising concerns about an inevitable industry shakeout.

In Part I of this Executive Update series, we described the four components of the enterprise innovation chain (value innovation, management innovation, business model innovation, and invention) and how this concept relates to Cutter's annual survey on innovation practices by comparing the results of our 2007 and 2008 surveys. 1 Here in Part II, we continue our examination of the key findings.

The major BI vendors as well as a number of independent software vendors now offer products that combine the ease of use of Internet-style search engines with the reporting and analysis capabilities of BI tools.

Many service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance initiatives become bogged down in a bureaucracy that militates against the very agility that SOA promises in the first place. Is there a way to achieve agile SOA governance, or is this simply an illusion? Fortunately, our experiences show that there are responsive and practical approaches to SOA governance. As with most things in life, balance is the key.

Many service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance initiatives become bogged down in a bureaucracy that militates against the very agility that SOA promises in the first place. Is there a way to achieve agile SOA governance, or is this simply an illusion? Fortunately, our experiences show that there are responsive and practical approaches to SOA governance. As with most things in life, balance is the key.

Part I of this series of Executive Updates examined the traditional way in which we develop, distribute, market, and sell software as a number of discrete releases.1 The following five observations were made with respect to the myth of the release:

There's a challenge brewing in the trenches. It's tense, yet full of opportunity. It is bottom-up and top-down. It's personal -- and organizational. It's about power and control. It's therefore complicated and potentially very, very nasty. But, ultimately, it's about survival: we will change, or we will die.

Training and awareness initiatives within organizations are like the dust bunnies hiding under your bed that you never want to think about. However, business leaders would be wise to realize that there is not a more effective information security and privacy defense than informed and aware personnel, as Part I of this three-part Executive Update series shows.

Many corporations and public-sector organizations are struggling with the increasingly rapid changes in the business and political environment. Market conditions, cost constraints, and technology implementations often bring stress to an IT organization. One of the most significant stress points is the lack of IT management's ability to effectively gain support for an enterprise architecture (EA) and provide a roadmap to generate asset value from IT investments.

IT has proven itself a catalyst for creating new ways to engage customers, build sales channel relationships, and sell products and services. Enabling new forms and methods of collaboration is where IT has shone quite conspicuously, as professionals are now equipped with the tools to meet, confer, and share ideas from across the hall or across the continent in real time.

Organizations of all sizes across every industry are facing unprecedented business challenges that are forcing them to rethink how they operate. However, many IT and corporate decision makers are still hesitant to put aside traditional software and systems in order to more effectively perform day-to-day operations and improve their ability to achieve long-term objectives.

IT shops generate oodles and oodles of metrics. IT hardware and software can spit out hundreds of operational metrics, mostly to monitor system performance and diagnose system errors. On the hardware side, routers, switches, and data devices produce metrics that let operators infer the volume and kind of usage patterns at work.

Many people treat outsourcing as a task, something that most people can do in addition to their "real job." But once you look at the entire process required for an outsourcing lifecycle, you will see that there are a number of competencies required if you want the entire deal -- from womb to tomb -- to be a success.

This is the final installment of our three-part Executive Updates series on the topic of operational business patterns. In Parts I and II, we showed how operational business patterns describe the essence of how an enterprise is organized to realize its value proposition, and we reviewed two example patterns.1

The enterprise innovation Executive Update series was conceived initially through a short poll on innovation practices at Cutter Summit 2006. This networking initiative has evolved into a more thorough survey conducted first in 2007 1 -- and then repeated in 2008 on a larger scale.

It's one thing to know generally how enterprise search can perform and in what specific markets -- it's another to understand the unique capabilities of representative products. This Executive Update is the last in a three-part series about enterprise search.

If you've been succeeding with agile in your organization for a while, you've experienced projects that make more visible progress, are done earlier, and provide a high level of satisfaction for everyone involved.

The current financial crisis has a lot to say on many subjects, which is why its epitaph will take years and many authors to write. Like many cautionary tales, some lessons are available for learning immediately; the story of risk happens to be one of them.

Recently, I attended a conference that had a thin but interesting service-oriented architecture (SOA) track, with sessions such as "SOA: Hype or Happening" and "Security and Governance of Online and B2B SOA Traffic." While I attended both sessions, here I focus on the discussion in "SOA: Hype or Happening" as a followup to Part I of this two-part Executive Update series.1

Complex event processing (CEP) is an emerging technology that combines business process modeling (BPM), enterprise integration, and rules-based technology to monitor and aggregate information in real time from distributed messaging systems, databases, and enterprise applications.

For most of my adult life, I have been perplexed by a Pavlovian phenomenon: whenever I, as an engineering manager, released code to manufacturing, 1 the marketing folks reacted by conducting a three-week worldwide analyst tour. As much as I appreciate good public relations for my products, I viewed this phenomenon as a mystery that I might one day solve, perhaps when I retire.