It's probably no secret to most people who know me that I'm a real fan of the film It's a Wonderful Life.  Since most organizations in North America will be slowing down next week, I thought I'd share a quick 30 second rendition of the film, as protrayed by bunnies.  If you'd seen the movie, you'll reconize most of the scenes.

Happy Holidays to everyone, and have a wonderful New Year.

No, it's not about paychecks running late, or tax bills for $145 billion.  It's the fact that companies are still sending mail to the WTC offices and to people who are no longer with us.

NEW YORK—It's the kind of holiday mail that might have been tossed aside, discarded like any other piece of junk mail: a special offer for a facial at a local spa.

Only the address on the letter no longer exists. And the woman the letter is addressed to died more than five years ago in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1165187408545

(The link above is good only for the next 7 days)

If you still manage data that results in mailings to ZIP Code 10048, it might be a sign that those addresses are no longer current.   I realize that one can't always just delete accounts or change addresses, but it seems to me that after 5 years, come companies could take some time to find out what the new address is, or whether these addresses should be marked Do Not Mail.

One of the great features of web logs is that they track, based on IP addresses, the location of visitors to web sites.  I get our site logs mailed to me on a regular basis and I love looking at the report on where visitors are located.  Take a look at our October stats mapped to visitor location, listing the top 25 locations. .

A recent Dice survey finds that we IT pros are very, very happy with our jobs:

Builder.com writer Brian Schaffner has a great article on 10+ things you should know about service oriented architecture (SOA).  I've read a lot of articles on SOA, but Brian has hit on some important ideas that I don't read in a lot of vendor articles.  For instance he writes that SOA doesn't have to include web services and that jumping to SOA can be difficult.

What got my attention, though, is his item number 7:

#7: SOA requires a keen understanding of business data

Because SOA is focused on business processes, it's important to understand the data that's relevant to those processes. For instance, an ordering process has several key data artifacts, such as the order, the customer, the shipping information, the invoice, the payment, and the receipt. What's even more important is being able to describe these artifacts in a standard way so that each service that participates in the process can understand the data equally.

For organizations with an existing information architecture, this may not be a big issue. However, for large organizations with limited or nonexistent information architecture, this issue can be a show-stopper when it comes to implementation. Because large organizations have such a variety of data, it is usually recommended to take an evolutionary approach to defining the information architecture, as opposed to a big-bang approach. This means that instead of spending four years defining the ultimate data model, it's better to spend a small amount of time during service development to define just the data that's relevant to that service. As each service or process is implemented, the associated information architecture can be evolved to include the necessary data artifacts.

He gets it right - no 4-year projects to define the ultimate data model, and that these models are most valuable when developed incrementally.

Of course, his definition and my definition of "small" are probably different, but I believe he and I are in agreement here.