Author's note: The phrase "IT asset management" used in this Update is a term of art and should not be confused with "IT Asset Management" as a defined IT management discipline that includes software license management, configuration management, and a host of other techniques.

Few areas of technology law may be as frustrating to business owners as the law of database rights. Databases represent a significant investment in time, energy, and, in many cases, money by the businesses that compile them. However, depending on where the business that compiles the database is located, the databases may have a great deal, some, or virtually no protection.

Simply put, open source software is software that can be freely used, modified, and redistributed by anyone. These terms of release have two key implications. First, they create the potential for software products to be collaboratively developed by communities of developers (both individuals and organizations) in a mode of production and innovation that Yochai Benkler termed "peer production" [1].

Who knows what Visicalc is? It is a nifty little software application, and if you are 30 years old or younger, then Visicalc is older than you.

For most businesses, buying the items needed to run the business is simple: order the item, pick it up or have it delivered, perhaps inspect it, pay for it, and it belongs to the business. Whether the item is a box of paper clips or a supertanker, the process is essentially the same.

This Executive Update looks at the changes that were made to the Villanova University undergraduate MIS, MBA, and Executive MBA (EMBA) programs in response to lessons learned from the development and delivery of a corporate executive education program in business technology leadership.

Web 2.0 tools and technologies -- like wikis, blogs, podcasts, mashups, folksonomies, RSS filters, social networks, virtual worlds, and crowdsourcing -- offer new opportunities for corporate productivity and management. But how do you know which ones to pilot? How do you know what to assess?

This Executive Update presents an approach in conducting an application architecture assessment in a software industry. As business grows, there is an ever-increasing demand from the enterprise applications to meet more and more automated business features with an increased user base. And as an enterprise application scenario becomes more complex, there is pressure to meet the same service-level agreements in order to get an expected quality out of the applications.

In the earlier days of computers, data had to be encoded before it could be used by an electronic system. This meant that information that lived in its "natural" state -- unstructured, scattered around, written or spoken language -- could not be readily used by computers. It also meant that each system and program would work with information designed according to its own internal architecture, which often would not be compatible with other systems.

The intent of this Executive Update is to compare the behavioral expectations of an agile leader/manager with those of a Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF) and then to use that comparison to better define leadership in an agile environment.

Increasing availability of broadband Internet access combined with advances in multiplayer online gaming are starting to build a new concept of Web presentation that can no longer be ignored -- the virtual world, a concept that embraces what has also come to be called the 3D Internet (3Di) or the metaverse.

It is not unusual for business and IT organizations to be in conflict. Depending on the maturity of the IT organization, this can be anything from mild disagreement that IT doesn't understand the business and is not sure what is required to operate it, to open hostility between the organizations. It has come to the point where some customer organizations want to break from their IT organization and start their own IT group or outsource the whole lot.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS)1 model is having a profound effect across the entire spectrum of corporate computing.

In Part I of this two-part Executive Update series (Vol. 8, No. 16), I discussed the meaning and expectations of agile project leadership and what agile project leaders need to know. Here, I continue this discussion by examining leadership styles and the impact of vision/value alignment.

The purpose of this Executive Update is to critically examine service contract price benchmarking as a tool to measure price efficiency of contracted complex services against market prices. A complex service contract can be viewed as a legal framework tied to a financial model. As a result, what is actually being benchmarked is a price exhibit tied to an underlying complex financial model.

"Web 2.0" is a phrase in search of a meaning. This can be a very convenient state of affairs for consultants, since it can be used to add shine to just about any idea. My first reaction to the idea of Web 2.0 was a quick roll of the eyes (after all, there is nothing new under the sun). I fell into the camp with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of what we can presumably call Web 1.0, who said, "Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means" [3].

The arrival of a new CEO can bring about fairly profound cultural change. The chosen leader might introduce new strategic goals or a new way to execute existing ones, while installing a personally selected senior executive team. As the leader of the IT organization, the implications for the CIO are equally profound, especially if technology will be called upon to support the new leader's vision.

One of the most exciting areas of interest in IT today is information extraction. While the prospect of unlimited information coming our way can be thrilling in some respects, users have become wary of the risks and threats associated with such proliferation (for example, the huge amount of time necessary to filter, acquire, and usefully apply all such knowledge).

Innovation is important for economic development at a national level and for business survival at a corporate level. However, if the trend toward global virtual activity and outsourcing continues, then we are heading for an overall slowdown in innovation as the corporate problem space is outsourced and virtual working practices raise barriers to collaboration and problem sharing.

There is an interesting story from the early days of software told by one of the luminaries of software engineering, University of Southern California Professor Barry Boehm. He quotes an air force general frustratingly trying to manage the development of a complex project:

Business publications and conferences are buzzing with talk of metrics and analytics. Stories abound of companies working to get more sophisticated about what they measure and how they assess success -- in particular, trying to understand how the "special sauce" of how more subjective/less quantifiable aspects of their work can impact the bottom line and effect competitive advantage.

This is the third and final installment of a three-part Executive Update series on applications outsourcing based on a recent Cutter Consortium survey of 95 organizations. 1 Here in Part III, we examine patterns regarding the client-supplier relationship after reflecting upon the survey question, "Do you plan

"How big are blogs?" asked BusinessWeek back in 2005. "Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution" [1]. To compare blogs with Gutenberg's invention of moveable type is, perhaps, mildly hyperbolic. A blog is more of a literary style than a new form of information technology, and the World Wide Web itself bears much more conceptual resemblance to the printing press than do blogs.

While master data management (MDM) will bring some order to the chaos in otherwise diverse source systems, it has an interesting role to play in new-generation business intelligence (BI) architectures (dubbed by some as BI 2.0). One of the key features desired by the entire BI user community and also the non-BI community (who hopes to benefit from the analytics technologies and capabilities of BI) is the realization of search-enabled BI.

The perils of traditional project management have forced those involved to look at better ways of managing dynamic and complex projects. In this context, agile project leadership has emerged as an optimistic move toward effectively managing such projects. As agile project leadership evolves, a number of questions are being raised and answers sought in order to both strengthen the framework behind it and explore ways to develop agile project leaders.