Editor's note: This Executive Update is excerpted from the Software Engineering Institute's Governing for Enterprise Security (©2005 Carnegie Mellon University). Permission has been granted to Cutter Consortium to reproduce.

The quip to emerge from business process offshoring's growing prominence is this: if you want to avoid being laid off from offshoring, then become the person who manages all the offshoring initiatives in your organization. Surely someone has to hang around to turn off the lights at the end of the day.

So what the hell is going on in our industry anyway? Should we be happy, or should we be worried? Here are five things to think about.

As if our current buzzwords had already run their course, or we didn't have enough to last us, a new buzzword has hit the enterprise architecture and application scene. "Applistructure" describes the latest trend to combine enterprise business applications with enterprise infrastructure.

In this Executive Update, I'd like to take you on a journey into a world where risk and opportunity are synonymous and good project managers (PMs) are routinely asked to believe at least four impossible things before breakfast (to paraphrase the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass).

Editor's note: This Executive Update is excerpted from the Software Engineering Institute's Governing for Enterprise Security (©2005 Carnegie Mellon University). Permission has been granted to Cutter Consortium to reproduce.

With the paramount importance of technology in the postindustrial era, outsourcing inevitably creates a strategic partnering relationship as the organization and its suppliers acknowledge greater levels of interdependence. As running and maintaining the arrangement is an ongoing collaborative process that requires working as a team, the parties need to be acting in concert.