Learning is the willingness to be open to the input that comes from the environment with a commitment to apply one's mind to understand this input and a passion to stay with the understanding long enough to be able to derive one's own insights. This, followed with conviction to integrate one's own understanding and insights into a real-life context, makes learning a meaningful process.

-- J.M. Sampath [1]

David Lineman makes a number of points in his wonderful Cutter IT Journal E-Mail Advisor "Securing the Long Tail." Some of the points, while well known, are still true and important to state.

The rising publicity of IT service outsourcing has sparked much speculation and expectation. Companies' conception and misconception of outsourcing, coupled with the unique business situation of each organization, give rise to diverse outsourcing strategies and practices across firms and industries.

We are often advised to do a gap analysis in situations where stakeholders -- anyone consuming the outputs of some function -- are unsatisfied with the current products or services. "Just do a gap analysis and figure out what needs to be done," we're told by these stakeholders, magazine articles, and consultants.

The need to transition to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become a gradual but increasingly incessant mantra over the past several years, promoted by pundits and vendors and understood as a means of improving efficiency, integration, and Web enablement. Most corporations today have some form of a transitioning plan in place. However, in some areas, what is going to be required is still rather vague.

This is the last in a three-part series of Executive Updates on data management and analysis. Part I (Vol. 7, No.

This Executive Update is the second of two that extends the work on agile project management and sets forth to explore how a company can introduce agility into its portfolio of developmental projects. The combination of increased uncertainty and complexity in company environments calls for the development of these new management forms and a shift in management thinking.

Compliance issues continue to create concern for corporate executives, even as the first wave of panic over Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) is beginning to settle. The new regulations are of particular relevance to IT because they impose requirements on management concerning how data is collected and stored. The need for accountability and auditing has, in turn, brought procedures under close scrutiny -- particularly in areas related to the management and storage of data and communications.

This Executive Update is the seventh in a series that examines information and communications technology (ICT) outsourcing and its various configuration options. The series is based on a recent Cutter Consortium survey of 73 organizations in 25 countries across the globe. 1

In a recent Cutter Consortium survey of 95 organizations, 1 nearly 73% of respondents report that they plan to outsource parts of their IT in 2007. The largest sector reports that they plan to outsource about 11%-25% of their IT functions, mostly comprising project work for software applications development and maintenance.

"Sixty-five percent of software features are rarely or never used" [1]. This statistic is alarming to corporate leaders. The wasted costs spent on developing and marketing these unused features comes to mind immediately. Most experienced project leaders, however, are not surprised.

Today, business change -- meaning changes in conditions that force organizations to rethink planning assumptions, business models, and goals -- occurs with such pace and force that management experts are rallying around the simple proposition that future success might depend on an organization's capacity to successfully adapt to these changes. In fact, this ability to adapt to change seems to be just as important to business success as are other factors, including innovation and customer service.

This Executive Update is the sixth in a series that examines information and communications technology (ICT) outsourcing and its various configuration options. The series is based on a recent Cutter Consortium survey of 73 organizations in 25 countries across the globe. 1

Any discussion of inventiveness always brings me back to the phone call privacy problem in Budapest several years ago -- it is an interesting case study. At the time, we were worried that anyone with minimal technical skills could figure out how to listen in on calls being made over the new wireless phone network that we were installing.

Today, business process management (BPM) represents both a healthy cut of IT investment and the shining path for organizations that believe that designing and implementing new business processes or reengineering old ones set the direction for significantly improved enterprise performance. So fixated on the capabilities of the technology are some organizations that they overlook the tight relationship between the product features and the management and governance issues surrounding their use.

In this Executive Update, we propose a three-level enterprise architecture that allows organizations to manage their computer and information assets -- hardware, software, processes, and data -- based on the Web services model. We denote these levels as resource, application, and strategic.

Last year, several business intelligence (BI) vendors -- including IBI, Cognos, and Business Objects -- introduced new products that combine the reporting and analysis capabilities of their BI tools with the ease of use of Internet search engines.

Massive shifts in e-commerce, collaborative work environments, and global operations make information technologies the very machinery of current commercial operations. IT plays an important role in strategic planning, and cost-effective implementation of the right IT investments creates competitive advantage.

In Part I (Vol. 10, No. 8) of this two-part Executive Update series on rich Internet applications (RIAs, pronounced ree-ahs), I lamented the way that the Web app tsunami set back user interface evolution by almost a decade, derailing architectural thinking and tossing us back to an essentially forms-based interface. But the situation is rapidly improving.

This is the second in a three-part series of Executive Updates on data management and analysis. In Part I (Vol. 7, No.

The combination of increased uncertainty and complexity in company environments calls for the development of new management forms and a shift in management thinking. This Executive Update extends the work on agile project management and sets forth to explore how a company can introduce agility into its portfolio of development projects.

Mobile workers are just like the rest of us -- except that they are mobile. And therein lies the problem. Mobile workers today are just as reliant upon efficient access to corporate data and applications as other workers are. In fact, at times they are even more so -- as in the case of a representative preparing a quote, for example. Yet the capabilities for obtaining and managing the mobile network connection are not nearly as robust as those within the corporate facility.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has garnered considerable attention over the past two years, as the Web-based business applications provided by upstart companies such as Salesforce.com and Google have experienced significant growth and challenged the standing of established players such as Siebel, SAP, and even Microsoft.

To live in this pluralistic world means to experience freedom as a continual oscillation between belonging and disorientation.

-- Gianni Vattimo [3]

You may not have heard about rich Internet applications (RIAs, pronounced ree-ahs), but you have seen them. RIAs are the visible face of that technological, financial, and sociological phenomenon known as Web 2.0. Suddenly we are encountering Web sites with breathtaking effects (www.rasikarestaurant.com) and terrific capabilities (www.housingmaps.com).