Part I in this two-part Executive Update series (Vol. 9, No. 3) defined green IT and discussed the developments and initiatives that have led to an awareness of the need for green data centers in the information and communications technology (ICT) industry. Here in Part II, I discuss some principles, make recommendations for the design and operation of a green computing infrastructure, and propose a strategy for implementation.

Grid Computing Now! is a UK-based knowledge-transfer network aimed at championing the adoption of grid computing technologies to IT leaders in UK public and private sectors.

In the first Executive Update of this two-part series, I examined the need to be prepared for a looming crisis in the data center due to the lack of planning and execution in green IT. Here in Part II, I present a way to look at your data center energy efficiency in order to be prepared for such a crisis.

Consider the following three-week approach to establish a sound response.

Given the complex and global nature of today's business world, organizations are looking for ways to deal with realities and turn them into advantages. As a result, a focus on innovation has become a key strategic differentiator, resulting in competitive, sustainable advantage and maximized stakeholder value.

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.

Information technology was put "in play" by Year 2000 (Y2K) remediation, the dot-com crash of 2000, and the "IT doesn't matter" argument that first appeared in 2003. People began to think about technology differently after so many events and so much attention. Was technology a blessing or a curse? Could it transform business models -- or just enable existing ones?

Barry Boehm recently told us something that we all know but which many of us don't want to believe. The prominent University of Southern California professor stated that every software project has a lower bound on its development time.

Enterprise risk management (ERM) is founded on the relatively recent understanding that bringing together the many and diverse silos of risk management within an organization will result in a more efficient and cost-effective approach as well as yield additional benefits from natural synergies.

In Parts I and II of this Executive Update series (Vol. 8, Nos. 17 and 19), we started to look at how "measuring what matters" can add value to and drive success of an IT outsourcing relationship.

Today, the skill set required to upgrade data center energy efficiency echoes the very same knowledge required to rapidly downsize IT operations during an energy emergency. As a data center manager, do you have that skill set? If you were tasked with developing a plan in a few weeks to lower IT power consumption by 50% as quickly as possible, could you write a plan while minimally affecting operations? What would you do first, second, and third?

In the previous parts of this Executive Update series, I focused on the application of the concept of refactoring needs to various processes related to software development -- refactoring needs being an ingredient of enterprise architecture (EA) [1-4]. Here in Part V, I share some insights regarding the value that EA and its management processes gain from the concept.

Web 2.0 is the most talked about emerging technology trend today; it is creating quite a splash as it stretches the boundary of what the traditional Web can do. In the absence of any industry consensus, Web 2.0 can best be explained as the second phase in the evolution of the Web that provides an enriched end-user experience and enhanced online social collaboration.

There are many hollow buzzwords floating around, and "crowdsourcing" may sound like one, but it isn't. It is a fascinating term that was coined just a couple of years ago [2], and if you google it, you'll get more than half a million hits. Crowdsourcing refers to the way consumers participate in the creation of the products they use, and it has caught on quickly.

While software-as-a-service (SaaS) has gained plenty of attention and acceptance within the business units of a growing number of companies of all sizes, IT managers and their staffs have been apprehensive about the operational and organizational implications of SaaS.

Some of the most exciting advances in software have come from surprising sources. The military and defense industries, for example, have benefited greatly from recent advances in graphics and animation, many of which originated in -- and here's the surprise -- video games (which in 2006 was a six-billion-dollar business).

The term "ombudsman" comes from an Old Swedish word meaning "representative." An ombudsman's role is typically to provide an objective and supervisory role for issues that involve human rights, as well as provide the processes and resources to assist in resolving problems.

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.

2008 could well be a watershed year for environmental concerns in the US, and this has a number of important consequences for IT. Although the concern is greatest in Europe and Asia, the UN Climate Change Conference 2007 in Bali has reinforced the fact that "green" issues now have global importance. Increasingly, they will be used as a bargaining chip in political and economic negotiations.

How much of your IT budget goes for applications maintenance? By applications maintenance, I mean everything that is spent on an application after it is put into use. This includes enhancements, upgrades, repairs, vendor fees, and contractor support.

One of the most vital concerns for enterprise architecture (EA) is its evolution: the ability to purposely shape EA with regard to various small changes introduced to an IS environment. The issue of implementing changes to EA in a coordinated manner was the genesis for the concept described in the previous parts of this Executive Update series [1-3].

Retailers increasingly rely on sophisticated information technology to support the management of their supply chains. Retailers track the flow of material between their stores, distribution centers, and upstream suppliers. Ideally, they share detailed information across and within the firm pertaining to inventory, forecast sales, actual sales, and delivery schedules, among other key metrics. To incorporate this information into formats useful to users, retailers are turning to scorecards.

IBM has raised the possibility that the mainframe of the future might well be a cloud. This is likely to have considerable long-term implications for vendors and IT departments alike. On 11 November 2008, IBM announced its Blue Cloud program to offer a cluster-computing cloud infrastructure for sale in the spring of 2008, based on a mixture of open source and proprietary software and powered by a BladeCenter-based data center using x86 and Power processors.

Collaboration has been a widely recognized concept for practitioners in the Internet-driven age of this 21st-century business world.

When asking a typical IT manager about a single area where an enterprise architecture (EA) effort should be able to prove its value, probably the most expected answer would be "giving support to projects being run." It is not my ambition here to present the whole scope of possibilities in which EA could support running projects but rather to focus on the refactoring needs concept introduced in Part of this series. Recall that Part II presented refactoring needs in the context of an actual case study in which I worked. Here in Part III, I continue with that case and get into more details about how the refactoring needs built on an EA could support and synergize ongoing software development projects.

Over the last few years, it has become clear to many practitioners that a portal can add distinct value, agility, robustness, and versatility to their business applications [1, 3, 4, 6]. A portal can introduce the doorway to a common view while providing access to applications in multiple organizations of the enterprise.