With a widespread economic downturn well underway, top managers are prioritizing cost reduction as never before—and they are looking for new solutions and proven practices. It’s inevitable that cost-cutting efforts will land heavily on IT, since it is a significant cost center and because it impacts costs in almost every business activity.

On February 2, The Open Group and members of its Architecture Forum launched a new version of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). The long-awaited TOGAF™ 9 offers several significant improvements over the previous edition. It has been restructured to provide a more modular structure, and it has undergone intensive editing to ensure consistent and appropriate use of terminology throughout. Several existing techniques have been clarified and expanded, and several new features have been added.

Information technology (IT) related projects, just like traditional design and construction efforts, are team activities. A variety of individuals and talents come together for a project and combine their efforts to produce a system or application. IT projects of a material size also are renowned for their relatively low success rate. While some of this can be attributed to the complexity of the undertaking, the root cause of many failed projects is leadership.