In prediction markets, such as Intrade, TradeSports, and the Iowa Electronic Markets, a broad range of people express their opinions about future events in politics, economics, or sports by backing them with small bets. The results are reliable predictions of the probabilities of these future events.

Benchmarking of outsourcing contracts has recently become a highly desired practice by client organizations, but it is often poorly executed. It can be a difficult and expensive process regardless of how services are sourced, internally or externally. In Part I of this two-part Executive Update series (Vol.

Virtualization has become increasingly important in data centers over the past several years, as companies have sought to contain costs, reduce physical server use, and improve efficiency. In this Executive Update, we'll examine the current issues and strategies in the virtualization realm.

Coaching is one of the fastest-growing consulting services of the 21st century. Much like the athletic coach committed to taking athletes to higher levels of performance, the business or leadership coach empowers individuals and teams to achieve their best. Coaching is increasingly being used by organizations as part of a leadership and management development strategy -- as a tool to help leaders enhance their skills and as a powerful means for people to learn and achieve their potential.

This Executive Update is the first in a two-part series that looks at the results of a recent Cutter survey on the use of enterprise application mashups in organizations. 1 Here in Part I, we look at the different ways to define enterprise mashups, evaluate the use of and interest in mashups in organizations, and examine the use of best-of-breed resources.

While we are still trying to get our heads around the concepts and terminologies surrounding the Semantic Web, hints of a "Pragmatic Web" are finding their way into conversations and exchanges as some important new idea that is lurking in the background and hasn't quite yet made it onto the IT agenda.

Studies indicate that coaching can significantly improve bottom-line performance and may make the difference between business success and failure. It is not news that organizations are under intense pressure to improve and to innovate. Reliance on knowledge workers who demand a voice in shaping their work requires new managerial skills to engage employees, and organizational leaders are finding that different cultural norms and behaviors are required to harness the knowledge of their employees.

This Executive Update is a bit of a departure from our usual writings as it instead illustrates an important lesson by presenting a story, which is compiled from my many experiences helping leaders make meaningful changes within individuals, teams, and their organizations.

In this Executive Update, Cutter Consortium Fellow Steve Andriole offers his expert advice as to the type of business technology education today's undergraduates should be receiving. These students will be your future IT employees. What do you think these students should be learning from their coursework? Read on to see whether you agree with his recommendations.

While CORBA has less than a handful of program language bindings, Web services clients can be a JavaServer Page, servlet, or Java application or an executable written in languages such as C++, Perl, Visual Basic, JavaScript, and so on -- it's a truly ubiquitous protocol.

In January 2008, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey of 101 end-user organizations regarding their use of business performance management practices. The goal was to determine the degree to which companies are implementing business performance management techniques and technologies.

With any new approach, there will be those who think it's the best thing since sliced bread, those who think it's just a fad, and those who simply don't care. When it comes to agile project management, however, everyone should be paying attention, because it really does matter. It's not just a management fad; it's a wake-up call for an industry that has an awful track record and is in need of serious help.

The controversy over Net neutrality raised its head again when the Associated Press reported in October 2007 that Comcast was throttling peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet traffic. Proponents of Net neutrality saw it as the smoking gun that definitively proves the need for Net neutrality legislation. The debate and the various calls for legislated remedies have introduced an air of uncertainty in the marketplace.

Blogs and other social media tools have become quite a permanent phenomenon in the online world. Today, the tremendous community interaction on blogs is a potential hotbed for companies ever eager to gain market insights. Naturally, companies are setting up blogging infrastructures and engaging themselves in eliciting information from these blogs.

The word "agile" is equipped with an easily understood definition and a lot of street buzz in management circles today. There's no company that would not want this adjective affixed to its reputation. What a definition does not provide is a process roadmap for that successful leap from ponderous to agile. A simple framework can serve as the starting point for that jump.

In the first Executive Update of this two-part series (Vol. 9, No. 4), I presented a case study that illustrated the challenges a company implementing agile methodologies might face if it did not consider three specific implementation objectives:

Organizational support

Despite an organization's best efforts to create a positive experience with their customers, patients, and employees, and to provide the most effective safeguards possible for personally identifiable information (PII), there will always be issues and incidents that occur to create dissatisfaction and friction.

Industrial manufacturers depend on streamlined supply chains to build products. Retailers live and die based on their optimal supply chains. Likewise, manufacturers of electronic products -- such as mobile handsets, consumer electronics, communications equipment, and other intelligent devices -- rely heavily on distributed developers, outsourcers, software vendors, and even open source. Then, why not treat this software ecosystem as an embedded software supply chain and try to optimize it?

We don't need to hear from Nick Carr, 1 we don't need another industry briefing, and we don't need the guys on CNBC talking about the sea change called Google. The industry was shifting long before all of these smart people learned how to monetize the trend with catchy phrases, titles, and insights.

Through the exploration of the latest version of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL V3), organizations that covet alignment between business units and the IT organization will discover that ITIL V3 has a lot to say about this elusive objective -- so much, in fact, that companies serious in their intentions will discover that with adoption of the framework, they'll get alignment at no extra charge. You see, in ITIL, alignment is not really an objective but rather the organic, unmanipulated outgrowth of successful framework adoption.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is meant to enable greater flexibility and improved alignment between business processes and applications. By separating individual services and permitting them to be provided in composite applications, the concept has some revolutionary consequences for IT infrastructure. It is also aligned with business process management (BPM), and some tout it as a paradigm-shifting technology. Most large companies are now implementing SOA in some form, and success stories are starting to command attention.

Concerns about the environment haven't been at this fever pitch since the early 1970s. With the relentless stream of current news articles demanding green action on the part of corporations as well as government, it is no surprise that attention is focused on the IT activities of the enterprise. The need for additional computing performance and value delivery to the corporation is causing a growing problem inflamed by rapidly escalating electric utility costs.

I never thought I would see the day that the firewall would have outlived its useful life. However, with the advent of WS-Security, which includes functionality for confidentiality, authentication, and integrity, the firewall may be an endangered technology. 1 Witness the fact that I am now hearing security professionals within large corporations actually talking about the possibility of doing away with firewalls.

Despite the promises of Web 2.0, few organizations have actually applied Web 2.0 principles in any significant way. Enterprises need something to assist them in realizing the potential of Web 2.0. Therefore, in Part I (Vol. 8, No. 2) of this two-part Executive Update series, we proposed the Web 2.0 Reference Model, which provides a holistic perspective for enterprises to consider the many constituents and factors that lead to the realization of Web 2.0 principles.

Are you a corporate leader or upper-level manager considering whether to implement one of the agile methodologies, such as XP, Scrum, Dynamic Systems Development Method, or others, because you have heard about its ability to deliver increased quality, business value, and customer satisfaction? If so, you are not alone.