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).

This Executive Update is adapted from Chapter 15 of our book Global RFID: The Value of the EPCglobal Network for Supply Chain Management (Springer-Verlag, 2007).

At the beginning of the season for almost any sport, the experts select those teams they believe will be the champions. More often than not, they base their selection on which team has the most skilled players -- those with the best skills, knowledge, and ability. But how often does the most-skilled team win?

In the domain of information security management, important innovations that improve an organization's overall security posture are as much behavioral and managerial as they are technical. As effective as a new technology is in blocking viruses or encrypting data, changes in policies, procedures, thinking, and behaviors that have a material effect on an organization's security strategy might represent the greatest innovations of all for some organizations.

Many organizations approach vendor management one vendor at a time. More sophisticated organizations, however, view their technology assets as a portfolio of hardware, software, services, and staff.

In Part I of this two-part series of Executive Updates (Vol. 8, No.

One of the uglier truths of the entire Windows franchise is the desktop maintenance and management costs introduced with the provisioning of workstations. IT and purchasing managers are fully aware that the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a workstation is often many factors of cost higher than the original purchase price. Relief in the form of support technologies has been sporadic and incomplete. Is the future more promising?

TCO in desktop and related device management has many guises, including:

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is proving to be a disruptive IT trend in the way software is delivered and consumed. Many companies today, both large and medium-sized, either have existing SaaS initiatives within their companies or are actively pursuing SaaS adoption. This pay-as-you-go model helps companies become more responsive to business while converting their fixed IT cost to a variable cost.

The number of data warehousing appliances -- prepackaged hardware/software offerings designed for specific applications such as data warehousing and BI -- on the market continues to grow.

Your organization may have recently decided to adopt Agile software development for its value proposition: project ROI, employee retention power, reduced software development pains, and so forth. Thus, your organization's leadership is now putting together its Agile enablement plan, covering such aspects as transition strategy, candidate projects and teams, community development, and transition leadership and support.

Outsourcing receives a great amount of attention, spawned in part by the highly publicized announcements of organizations that decide to transfer substantial parts of their IT to external parties. Invariably, the deals are described as successes and the litany of advantages are espoused before the supplier even begins operationalizing the contract.

It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop.

-- Confucius

This Executive Update is the first in a three-part series on outsourcing. In this series, we compare results from a current survey on outsourcing with those of a similar survey originally conducted by Cutter Consortium in late 2004.

At its best, being a CIO is a high-stress endeavor, and one of the most demanding tasks of all is that of developing proprietary inhouse solutions for your business. Why is this? As a COO at GE once told me, "Here's what I know about software: it always takes longer than promised; it always costs more than promised; and it never delivers all that's promised."

In the application development culture, IT professionals like to interpret enterprise architecture (EA) as the blueprint for all application systems. As a result, EA can seem more complicated than it should be; and, as we all have learned, complexity increases exponentially with the scope of requirements.

This Executive Update is adapted from Chapter 15 of our book Global RFID: The Value of the EPCglobal Network for Supply Chain Management (Springer-Verlag, 2007).

Contrary to the prevailing politically correct view, I remain convinced that leadership is more innate than acquired. However, the qualities of leadership are often absurdly overvalued or demonized.

Organizations are moving quickly to implement ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) because they believe it will improve performance, particularly in the service delivery area.

This Executive Update is the fifth 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

The creative response is an innate human characteristic, but only a small minority of people are what we may call "compulsive creatives" (i.e., habitually psychologically hooked on original thinking for its own sake).

The 21st-century shift from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy envisioned by such thought leaders as Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Peter Drucker, and others is quickly materializing. The shift is clearly marked by the rising importance of the terms "innovation" and "innovation management" in many modern enterprises as well as the extension of the notion of innovation beyond the traditional area of invention.

In Part I (Vol. 10, No. 3) of this two-part Executive Update series, we put forward the argument that integration in enterprise resource planning (ERP)-based environments can be achieved in ways other than adopting a software configuration-only approach.

In Part I (Vol. 10, No. 4) of this two-part series on service-oriented architecture (SOA), we provided a high-level review of SOA features, discussed some difficulties with a process-oriented SOA, and mentioned the need for unification of information and process in a SOA. In this Executive Update, we examine how this unification can be achieved.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) has been a headache for many public companies, but the discipline and transparency it forced on them produced an unexpected benefit -- better control of their business information (most of it electronic) and higher market valuations. The new electronic discovery (e-discovery) amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that went into effect on 1 December 2006 promise a similar headache -- and similar benefits.

Agile practices generally get their start when someone in an organization -- anyone -- begins to think something like, "I'm sure there is a better way to go about this business of developing software." That person can be a developer, a user, a manager, a team leader -- perhaps even you. There are, in fact, many "better ways," among which agile is only one possible choice. How we choose is largely a matter of preference, be it individual or organizational.