The core dynamic of open source software is the sharing of code and ideas so that communities can collaborate and build software that meets their collective needs. Nothing new here; the early history of scientific computing also adhered to this dynamic. However, with the rise of business computing in the middle of the last century, a proprietary model -- keeping software code private and licensing the use of the executable product -- emerged and took hold of the industry.

Enterprise architecture (EA) provides much more real value to an organization when it pervades various aspects of day-to-day IT efforts. In Part I of this Executive Update series, I introduced a concept that binds EA with change management and refactoring [1].

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is making a significant impact on corporate computing -- including the application of BI and data warehousing.

In Part I of this two-part Executive Update series (Vol.

As we learned in Part I of this series (Vol. 8, No. 17), an increasing number of companies are using formal metrics to measure the success of their outsourcing arrangements, but are seeing mixed results from metrics use. Of the outsourcing professionals Cutter Consortium recently surveyed who said they use metrics (over 60%), many are satisfied with their metrics, but nearly half (46%) feel they could get more value from the ways they use measurements to assess success in their deals.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is rapidly evolving to emulate the software industry as a whole.

IT organizations with ambitious plans in 2008 to source services, from infrastructure and application maintenance to application software development, must lay the groundwork with senior management for the necessary buy-in. Winning that support requires some understanding of the important predicates to sourcing success.

The ability to target specific processes within your organization, change them, and then see those changes quickly reflected in your business systems is no longer a "nice to have" in today's business climate -- it's a "must have." Being tied to a homegrown or aging business system that manages your warehouse or supply chain limits the ability for your systems to rapidly conform to process changes quickly.

The BI landscape is shifting gradually to embrace new topic areas and empower new classes of users. Although this has been a gradual evolution, the end result could have revolutionary consequences. Historically, powerful technologies tend to become more widely applied and more readily used over time, with the results often proving unpredictable. Two of the clearest examples from the past century are the personal computer and the Web.

What does it mean to be agile? How do we describe an agile manager or an agile enterprise? What characteristics set apart the agile from the nonagile? Are there people who are more, or less, suited for agile techniques and management?

There is a general belief in the information systems community, among developers, managers, and users, that the failure rate of software projects is unacceptably high.

Disclaimer: The author is not a lawyer, and information in this document does not constitute legal advice. Because the situations covered here are speculative, the author makes no warranties regarding the information provided. Anyone who has legal questions regarding this issue should seek professional legal advice.

Over the past three years, Cutter Consortium has been charting the growth of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market by conducting a series of annual surveys that was the first to discover widespread interest and adoption of SaaS solutions among organizations of all sizes.

It was 1998 and the company I worked for at the time was running a series of workshops for CIOs. I was facilitating a breakout session on communications and one of the CIOs said, "You know, what I'd really like to have is a dashboard of key IT performance measures that senior management could refer to at any time," and I wrote "CIO dashboard" on the flip chart.

Any business intelligence strategy should be business goals-aligned in order to ensure that the BI roadmap meets the client's business requirements as closely as possible. A business goals-aligned BI strategy allows the BI infrastructure and other BI related resources to be optimally utilized toward achieving core business goals. This will ensure that the business users are able to quantitatively relate the BI initiatives to their business goals, thus achieving higher acceptance rates for both the IT and business groups.

It is generally accepted that everything changes. Anything that exists, that we know of, is constantly in flux -- transforming, moving, expanding, contracting, yielding, and morphing into the next thing.

Despite some of the rhetoric we hear, agile development is not a religion. It is a methodology for identifying and building the right application to meet a business need. It involves close interaction between the business client(s) and the developers from the outset, small teams, colocation in a "bullpen" setting, frequent builds or iterations ("Did we get this part right?"), high trust and openness among members, and very high work involvement.

"For any business function, one key sign of having 'arrived' is the pressure to 'benchmark,'" according to Michael Mainelli, the Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Commerce at Gresham College [5]. Why then does Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, claim that "a flaw common to business and rampant in government is the failure to benchmark" [4].

As we all know, IT-business alignment has been at or near the top of the CIO issues list since the early 1990s. This means that no common wisdom has yet emerged on how to deal with it. As Cutter Senior Consultant John Berry puts it in a recent Cutter E-Mail Advisor, "Ah yes, like a weed, the alignment issue seems never to go away; perhaps because it is never fully resolved" [2]. Perhaps, but ignore this weed at your peril.

In thinking about enterprise architecture and the value it provides, one can see the focus is moving toward supporting big IT-enabled endeavors, which means providing them with the possibility of improved alignment with the existing information systems environment as well as the projects just being rolled out.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is having a significant effect on corporate computing -- including the application of BI and data warehousing. Available on-demand BI offerings today range from reporting, dashboards, and focused analytic applications (offered as licensable services) to hosted data integration services and managed data warehouses.

Innovation is essential to business. It can be applied to products, services, and business processes, and creates new value or marketing differentiation. The development of a creative new product or new approach -- which offers improvements over existing products or approaches -- provides competitive advantage.

The current business climate has raised the profile of innovation as a means of dealing with an increasingly complex environment. Factors of importance include:

A certification test can determine if people have a certain amount of knowledge on a given subject, but it can't determine if they can apply this knowledge appropriately, much less measure their judgment, communication skills, or how well they operate in a given work environment. Even in technical positions, nontechnical skills are typically more important when evaluating who is capable at their jobs.

Many people have the view that an organization can let go of commodity functions but must not let suppliers get their hands on strategic areas. Others call that nonsense and use third parties wherever they think they should. The arguments over this point generally result from inappropriate generalizations made on either side.

On 24 May 2007, the social networking site Facebook announced that it was opening up its API to the public so that Facebook participants could also become Facebook developers. In response, 25,000 developers reportedly launched 1,000 apps built with this API within the first two months [1].