There are lots of ways to think about alignment. Over the years, I've basically abandoned the term, but since it continues to persist in the literature (and I assume in the minds and hearts of technology professionals and business executives), perhaps we should continue to give it some due.

This is the last of a series of four Executive Updates in which I examine the results of a Cutter Consortium survey on service-oriented architecture (SOA). In this final Update, we shall be looking at the favorite products and vendors for SOA development, security, mainframe connectivity, and Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs).

In November 2006, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 102 end-user organizations worldwide about their use of text mining and analysis software for analyzing unstructured information.

Pair programming is a common practice that originated from Extreme Programming (XP), in which two programmers work collaboratively at one computer on the same design, algorithm, or code. The benefits of pair programming on software development are well documented and include improving design quality, reducing defects, lowering staffing risks, enhancing technical skills, and improving team communications [3, 8, 11]. Although pair programming has become increasingly popular, some programmers remain skeptical of pairing.

Perhaps the simplest and most pervasive software application for businesses is e-mail. Although possibly one of the greatest time wasters for employees and administrators alike (due to spam, viruses, and other kinds of unwanted messages), e-mail has been a great boon to the efficiency of business communication. It is generally cheap to send, immediate, and self-documenting.

This Executive Update is the third 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

Let's look at 10 things likely to come true in 2007. But let's also stipulate that I may not be entirely right about all these predictions. Nonetheless, I will stand by the macro trends that will drive the predicted events and conditions.

The challenge for the typical IT department has been to demonstrate that it is delivering real benefits from the organization's investment in information technology. The organization's executive management, from its point of view, has been increasing the amount of spending on information technology year-on-year with little or no tangible benefits.

In recent years, there have been a number of publications by industry luminaries regarding business transformation, execution, and innovation. In reality, each of these concepts plays a significant role in delivering tangible business values -- and must be connected with a common foundation that can link the associated business processes of the company.

What do you do when things go wrong? It's a fair question, and a good one to ask in almost any situation. That is because many plans, methods, and processes often break down when things don't go smoothly. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a well-thought-out plan or a good process is how well it survives when severe problems arise.

The November 2006 US elections in which Democrats were chosen to lead both the House of Representatives and the Senate will likely generate increased attention on the need to alter public policy to spur greater security of the nation's IT systems.

One of the many burdens of aging must include the ever-expanding accumulation of possessions that seem to defy easy classification for orderly storage and retrieval; you know you have too much stuff when you own something but can't find it, despite concerted efforts to organize items with easy access in mind. And so it has become with information. Today's desktop hard drive is a kind of family basement -- a repository of things ranging from the consistently useful to those which over time grow stale, esoteric, and useless.

IS departments commonly face three types of scenarios as they assist their parent organizations with mergers or the acquisition of a targeted business. These scenarios, which cover the gamut from naive to sophisticated, are listed below:

In December, we attended one of OMG's regular technical meetings, in part to see how its Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative is doing. We certainly can't claim impartiality in this respect as we recently published a book entitled Real-Life MDA: Solving Business Problems with Model Driven Architecture [1], in order to help accelerate the adoption of MDA in the IT industry. Nonetheless, we can safely say that, based on what we saw, MDA is rapidly becoming pretty mainstream.

A number of excellent articles have been written regarding the implementation of agile project management (APM) with offshore developers (see, for example, [1, 2]); I generally agree with their content, and the information still largely applies today. But there are several APM-driven practices identified in these and other similar articles that are out of reach for many of us, largely due to the scale of the majority of today's IT projects.

Follow the money. That's what corporations are supposed to do in a market economy, and value is to be rewarded with investment. However, when value becomes diffused within corporate structures designed for a bygone era, the appropriate investment does not occur, which generates negative consequences. Today, the investment community does not properly value corporate spending on security and resilience. This is true across our corporate structures.

The business rules embedded in software are as old as programming itself. The logical statement if-then-else is an ancient and sacred mantra that directs software behavior and is rightfully attracting new attention with the emergence of business rules management systems (BRMS). Managers not familiar with BRMS would do well to acquaint themselves with this class of IT for several reasons, not the least of which is its potential strategic value in enhancing operational performance.

The concept of enterprise architecture (EA) is not new, yet harnessing the power of EA is still not easy today.

In November 2006, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 102 end-user organizations worldwide about their use of text mining and analysis software for analyzing unstructured information.

Consider this: "We know why projects fail, we know how to prevent their failure -- so why do they still fail?" [5]. These oft-quoted words from Canadian government official Martin Cobb seem to highlight our frustrations with failing projects.

Public companies subject to the requirements of the US Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) are now entering adolescence in the lifecycle of SOX compliance. The next steps in the lifecycle include rationalization of spending, not only on SOX but on all compliance efforts the company is undertaking. Then, the next step is to find ways to automate the process in order to reduce cost.

The results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey of 97 business-IT professionals, reported in my previous Executive Update (Vol. 7, No. 20), reveal a complex structure of business process outsourcing (BPO) risks. The strategic risks that BPO client organizations face are tangled up with the project risks and means to reducing those project risks. It is not enough to manage and succeed in a BPO project.

Take a hard look at your business technology organization. What do you think you do well -- and poorly? This Executive Update presents an agenda for your team to consider. Review it and see what makes sense for your organization. Assess how well you understand trends -- and optimal responses to those trends -- as well as some of the best practices you may or may not be practicing.

We've all had a chance to think about project management discipline and how project management offices (PMOs) are doing. For about a decade now, many companies have implemented formal PMOs to help them deal with project inefficiencies usually defined as "late and overbudget." But where are we now in this area? Have PMOs been successful, or have they just added another bureaucratic layer to our projects?

In Part I of this two-part Executive Update series, I provided an overview of the methodology and approach used to develop detailed business processes for managing an IT environment, specifically related to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and its service management component. A real-life case study was presented, describing one of my clients -- a large organization with more than 50,000 employees that had limited understanding of ITIL or the benefits of service management.