WinFS is one of a set of frameworks that make up Vista's "Windows .NET Framework Extension" (WinFX). This is a superset of the .NET Framework, which is at the heart of Microsoft's .NET.1 Alongside WinFS, WinFX also includes Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously Indigo), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, previously Avalon), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).

In April 2006, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 106 end-user organizations about their use of open source business intelligence (BI) tools. The goal was to determine the degree to which companies are using or planning to use open source BI tools. In particular, the survey was designed to identify the issues and trends being encountered in these efforts and to provide statistics useful for benchmarking and measuring your own organization's use of open source BI tools.

A key concept of agile project management is that everything has to be field-tested before it gets recommended as a workable technique. One technique I recently decided to put under the magnifying glass is that of keeping a project journal. According to participants on the NewGrange project management list,1 about half of the project managers (PMs) kept some form of journal and half didn't. Those who didn't keep a journal cited two primary reasons:

Data privacy issues impact virtually every type of business. There are literally hundreds of laws and regulations within the US and throughout the world that require data safeguards to be implemented to help ensure the privacy and security of personally identifiable information.

How do you measure your vendors' performance? On-time delivery? Reject rate? Lowest product cost? Quality of service? These are all important metrics; however, they may not provide you with sufficient information to determine the adequacy of your return on the investment you made with your vendors. Such metrics tend to focus on the tactical attributes of the relationship but don't necessarily help evaluate the broader strategic attributes.

This Executive Update outlines a methodology developed by me and my colleagues to help assess the commercial potential of specific technologies. It involves the following four steps toward developing a plan for the exploitation of alternative technology opportunities:

Technology trends analysis

Market identification and business case development

How can you be satisfied that you've gotten what you've paid for? The issue is very familiar to anyone who has contracted for roofing repairs or had their car serviced.

There have been a lot of announcements pertaining to open source business intelligence (BI) tools (query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards, etc.) over the past 12 months or so. But the important question is: To what extent are companies actually adopting open source BI tools?

At the close of 1998, Time magazine chose the 100 most important people of the last 100 years. Neatly listed alphabetically between Walt Disney and Bill Gates, was titan Henry Ford. Lee Iacocca, a former Ford company president and something of a legend himself, was appropriately invited to write the Henry Ford item for Time.

Many problems with outsourcing deals stem from the supplier taking over activities that were not well understood by the client organization prior to engaging the supplier. Very early in the outsourcing lifecycle, the activities that are candidates for outsourcing are identified by the organization. But it is not enough to just target the services; a detailed understanding of the targeted services is essential or the organization faces the risks of providing inaccurate information to its suppliers.

Outsourcing contracts can be notorious because of their complexity and the inability of parties to interpret them in a reliable manner. But the contract conditions represent only one type of document that parties deal with in an outsourcing arrangement. Along with the contract, three other key documents -- service-level agreements (SLAs), price schedules, and procedure manuals -- comprise the basic suite of governing documents.

My advice regarding business technology strategy often repeats itself, not in terms of the same recommendations to different companies but in terms of the big questions that need to be asked of all organizations as they try to optimize their technology investments.

This Executive Update outlines a template -- a 5x7 matrix -- that can be used to launch business technology strategy assessments.

Public companies subject to the requirements of the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) have widely adopted two internal control frameworks over financial reporting: CobiT and COSO. CobiT is used for IT controls, while COSO is used for business processes and entity-level controls. These two frameworks, along with guidelines from the PCAOB (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board), can be mapped and integrated with one another to provide an overall plan for SOX and global compliance.

In today's economic climate, sourcing initiatives are mostly established and managed as relationship-driven engagements. Whether all parties involved in sourcing engagements (sourcing providers, clients, and associated third-party vendors) are equally vibrant in growing the partnership or not, sourcing companies make every attempt to satisfy and exceed their clients' expectations.

The human race has been defined in many ways: as "a featherless biped" (by Aristotle, who knew nothing of T. Rex or even the great apes), "homo sapiens," and "homo faber." It could equally well be classified as "homo garrulus," the species that loves to gossip, argue, and sound off -- especially on topics where there is unlikely to be a last word. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and the Web has done a magnificent job of letting the broad masses publish theirs.

With a stronger allegiance to and identity with technology more so than their employing companies, IT employees are perhaps the ultimate example of a prima donna knowledge workforce. Deeply technical, always changing, usually idiosyncratic, and almost always beyond the ken of business folks, IT knowledge is at a premium.

More than anything else, Windows stands or falls by its graphical user interface (GUI) -- which, with the advent of animation, video, audio, and other refinements, is rapidly turning into a multimedia user interface. That is why, ever since Windows 1.0, Microsoft has made the quality of the "user experience" a high priority.

A content management implementation is similar to a normal Web application development project with one significant difference -- the need for content. With Web applications or traditional software development, there is little content -- it is usually about data that already exists or will be entered by the users of the application.

Agile project management is more aligned to leadership best practice than to traditional project management best practice. This Executive Update illustrates this link and highlights some useful leadership additions for agile project managers. By recognizing this relationship, project managers can tap into a rich source of practical guidelines, case studies, and tools.

I teach a graduate course on business technology optimization at Villanova University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA). As I handed out a take-home exam to my students, it occurred to me that the exam might be an interesting instrument with which to check the state of the business technology relationship -- and some special projects -- at your company as well. Let's look at the exam questions and then discuss what they're really asking.

It's almost become a cliché to say that employees have been harping for years about how easy it is to use a search engine to search the extreme reaches of the Web to find information. Yet searching for information within one's own organization is difficult -- if not downright intimidating.

Suppose that you wanted to build a new kind of software development organization: one that could produce top-quality, feature-rich products year after year without burning out the engineers or their managers. What are the most important considerations in building an organization capable of sustainable development? In the first Executive Update of this series on the topic (Vol. 7, No.

A common sight at sporting events and shopping malls is the spectacle of a person or family, hands shielding eyes, searching frantically for the vehicle that they know they parked in a given location. In all likelihood, the vehicle has not disappeared or been stolen or repossessed -- but that doesn't make it any easier to find once it has been lost. A little preparation, of course, could have prevented the vehicle's location from being forgotten.

How do you know whether or not you have an excellent strategic alliance? What are the critical success factors that contribute to a productive, enduring, and profitable alliance? Does the very nature of the relationship mean that you always must work with the same partner? How does the concept of "coopetition" 1 apply to strategic alliances?

Corporations do not form alliances -- people do. [1]

Collaboration is as essential to business operations as competition, if not more so. When groups of people bring their ideas and skills together to contribute to a single project, powerful synergies can emerge to create better ideas, better plans, and better projects. Today, as organizations increasingly focus on their core competencies, collaboration is becoming ever more important. Why? Because organizations must work with both their outsourced services suppliers and their supply chain in order to remain in business.