One of the most persistent truths of information technology is the phenomenon called lock-in. Lock-in describes the fact that technology platforms do not naturally interoperate and that as users make commitments to specific platforms, they are "locked-in" to their decisions. This concept has collected a lot of dust over the years seeing as IT managers have endured this reality since the beginning of automation.

Lots of companies wrestle with organizational structure. Consultants and gurus have all sorts of ideas about how to organize technology in just about every company in the world. But what should the basics look like? What are the pieces that should work for just about all companies -- regardless of their vertical industry?

There are five primary pieces -- all under the authority of the office of the chief information officer (CIO):

A governance organization

After more than five years of agile software development, we understand its nuts and bolts pretty well: we know how to build software in an agile manner; we know how to set up an agile team; we have built an impressive set of powerful support tools; we know the caveats and limitations. And a year ago, the Standish Group named agile development as a major success factor in a software project.

"In Sun Tzu's1 time," writes IBM strategist Mark McNeilly, "warfare and statecraft, not commerce, were the means by which states grew rich and powerful." And just like then, "today's business world is one of continuing conflict between companies, as they strive for survival and success across the globe" [1].

This is the final installment in a series of three Executive Updates that examines enterprise architecture (EA) -- specifically, its organization and programs, how it provides governance, and the value it brings to companies. The series is based on data from a recent Cutter Consortium survey.

When we think of business intelligence (BI), we are describing how technology extracts information from an IT system and manipulates and translates that data into realities that deepen our understanding of some phenomenon in a business; for instance, sales by rep, by product line, or by territory, or manufacturing defect and yield rates by product line, by shift, or by manufacturing location. Any operational activity is a candidate for BI technology.

After more than five years of agile software development, we understand its nuts and bolts pretty well: we know how to build software in an agile manner; we know how to set up an agile team; we have built an impressive set of powerful support tools; we know the caveats and limitations. And a year ago, the Standish Group named agile development as a major success factor in a software project.

Now that the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance audit for 2005 is concluded, and reports are finalized and filed, it is natural for those involved to begin planning the event for the upcoming year. The cycle begins again with the following questions: What will it be like this year? Will it be as intense? Will it be better? Did we learn anything last year? Did we incorporate anything we learned other than ill feelings? Did any trends emerge? Can we survive another year?

Organizations use very different outsourcing structures and constantly appear to be seeking "the best one." Yet disparate structures may result in equally desirable outcomes. The configuration concept disaggregates the key structural elements of each outsourcing deal and allows you to see how to combine them in optimal ways.

The Trends Council recently had a very lively e-mail discussion that we thought you would enjoy reading. We hope it will provoke you and provide you with new reflections on current technologies and the present and future state of society and the world.

Imagine for the moment that you are about to drive across the US from Los Angeles to Boston. 1 You have mapped out in detail the costs, the resources needed, the time, the roads, and even some of the places you want to visit along the way: Las Vegas, Mount Rushmore and the Badlands, Nashville, and Chicago. You expect the trip to take 10 days and cost US $1,500. You leave Los Angeles and head east, with a plan to be in South Dakota by day four.

In this business, if you put enough opinions on record, sooner or later you will wind up with egg all over your face. Just this past June, it was my turn: no sooner had my Executive Update "WinFS: Integrated Storage for Windows" (Vol. 9, No. 11) seen the light of day, than WinFS was no more. It had ceased to be. It was an ex-project. And just when everything had seemed to be going so well ...

Business rules management (BRM) products are software tools that enable organizations to capture business rules and model, deploy, and maintain business rules applications. Although there is no hard definition as to just what exactly constitutes a BRM product, there are some basic capabilities that a BRM product should provide.

At the beginning of any software project, development teams have a set of constraints to work with and choices to make. Many of these choices are code-related.

In making these choices, many questions arise. How do we choose how and when to test the code? How, and to what extent, can we keep it simple and clear? How do we choose major frameworks and tools? How do we choose a development language and development environment? Which choices are most important, and how do they affect each other?

Organizations are under the constant threat of disaster and must implement an effective business continuity plan (BCP) that includes pre-incident preparation, analysis, mitigation, and recovery. When properly implemented, BCPs minimize business interruptions, allowing for seamless continuation of operations.

Successful application development and maintenance (AD/M) outsourcing relationships are contractually governed by a series of measures that monitor the performance and level of service provided by the outsourcing vendor.

The open source software development movement brought the IT world to attention with the creation of the Linux platform. An "innovation ecology" grew out of developers' enthusiasm for the possibilities of this technology as thousands of code jocks around the world contributed innovations and functionality to the Linux OS and Linux-based applications.

Thomas C. Schelling was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics, 1 but his most famous work was not strictly in that field; it was in game theory. In his 1960 landmark book The Strategy of Conflict [2], Schelling explains how you can increase your bargaining power by voluntarily binding yourself (e.g., "I can't pay you more for this project because I informed the board that I would resign if I did").

This is the second Executive Update in a series of three that examines enterprise architecture (EA) -- specifically, its organization and programs, how it provides governance, and the value it brings to companies. The series is based on data from a recent Cutter Consortium survey.

Putting the power of useful information into more hands in the organization has been a goal of business intelligence (BI) efforts beyond reproach, but what obstacles has achieving this objective created from a technology and management perspective? "Data democratization" in the BI domain is a trend worth watching because it reveals how chaotic and raucous democracy can be.

In my May 2005 Executive Report entitled "Principle-Centered Agile Project Portfolio Management" (Vol. 6, No. 5), I mapped an approach to agile project portfolio management that included an agile project management lifecycle. In this Executive Update, I will explore in more depth the second element of that lifecycle, which I call order (see Figure 1).

Much has been reported lately about companies and government entities mistakenly releasing consumer records or allowing them to be compromised by malicious third parties.

As the IT and BPO markets mature, customers expect more ambitious outcomes from suppliers beyond cost savings on baseline services. Customers want suppliers to completely transform their back offices: they want slick shared service facilities; superior services; reengineered business processes; integrated technology including self-serve, Web-based applications; highly empowered back-office leadership; and motivated back-office staff. Some customers even expect suppliers to commercialize their back offices once the transformation is complete.

As corporate networks push above Gigabit Ethernet, a whole new range of applications, once confined to special networks and limited usage, is coming into view. Broadband -- combined with real-time support as specified in IPv6 and provided on all of today's switches and routers -- makes it possible to stream audio, video, and massive application files around the enterprise without heavily impacting users. But what are those applications?

Most CIOs lead lives of quiet desperation, standing on a burning platform surrounded by a turbulent technological sea. But a few fortunate souls live in a different world -- one in which technology is seen by the organization as the "go-to" source for process improvement, as an enabler of business strategy, and even occasionally, as the means for achieving competitive advantage.