In the hierarchy of pressing issues that any technology company faces on a daily basis, insurance probably ranks near the bottom. Like parachutes, air bags, and Social Security, business insurance is a topic that most technology companies push to the back of their institutional consciousnesses, simply hoping that it will be there when it is needed.

We are going through an information technology and communications revolution. Computers are more mobile and more powerful than ever before. Information is shared more easily than ever before. With the press of a keyboard button, information can be sent to multiple countries throughout the world in less than a second. And more opportunities exist to threaten the privacy of personal information than ever before.

In my last two Executive Updates, (Vol. 8, No. 24; Vol. 9, No. 1), I focused on common errors that companies make when they try to implement metrics. I called them the "seven deadly sins" to highlight the fact that many metrics programs either fail or fade out of existence because of one or more of these classic errors.

There was a time when monolithic enterprise application suites appealed to businesses, not only because of their technical capabilities but also because they embodied well-validated business processes. Gradual but profound changes in the business world are altering this outlook, and the application software business is responding.

I recently reviewed Kevin Tate's Sustainable Software Development: An Agile Perspective (Addison-Wesley, 2006) for the Boston SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) newsletter In-the-SPIN. The book contains a roadmap to a software development organization that can produce high-quality, feature-rich software year after year without burning out the programmers or the managers. In my review, I generally praise Tate's emphasis on sustainability as key to success in software development.

In my last Executive Update (Vol. 8, No. 23), I wrote about specialty offices, one of which is the vendor management office (VMO).

In this Executive Update and the concluding one that follows, we continue our examination into the subject of lessons learned based upon the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey. In our survey of 105 IS/IT managers from around the world (for more information on survey demographics, see Part I [Vol. 2, No.

All too often, IT organizations spend the majority of their efforts analyzing the external factors of an outsourcing relationship, while taking a minimal amount of time to understand how this new development model will effect them internally. This Executive Update focuses on how organizations can reorganize their teams and internal processes so software outsourcing has a better chance of living up to its promise.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?

This phrase has been repeated so often that most of the time we uncritically accept this simple explanation as justification for believing that visual interfaces are inherently superior to textual ones. Software vendors, most noticeably the ones that sell decision support and analytic software, are quite apt to repeat the claim as well.

The past five years have seen a significant trend toward the corporate outsourcing and offshoring of both business operations and specific workforce skills. Now more than ever, companies are viewing these as viable options for improving cost containment, productivity, quality of service, ROI, and so on. As IT organizations consider outsourcing, hosting, and ASP models to manage mainline programs and projects, there is discussion about whether or not to outsource business intelligence (BI) programs as well.

Developing an IT strategic plan is like quitting smoking: it's easy -- people do it all the time. What's tough is sticking to it. All too common are recollections of plans gone by:

What's your standard for risk?

Vendors today are introducing new products that apply advanced algorithms designed specifically for e-mail analysis. The result is an emerging market: e-mail intelligence.

This Executive Update examines the use of e-mail intelligence tools, a market that is driven by the need for organizations to analyze the ever-increasing amounts of information accumulating in their corporate e-mail systems.

All agile methods constitute a highly disciplined set of practices meant to accommodate the realities of change and flux in high-risk system development.

From my perspective, agile methods have inculcated some risk-mitigation strategies for common risks into their techniques. Consider the following:

In this Executive Update and two more that follow in this series, we continue our examination into the subject of lessons learned based upon the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey. In our survey of 105 IS/IT managers from around the world (for more information on survey demographics, see Part I [Vol. 2, No.

Ask any IT professional what words and phrases spring to mind when you mention the words "organizational politics," and nine times out of 10 you will get responses such as: