Simply put, it’s doing in your homework. Just look at this sample M&A due diligence checklist.

In IT and the law, of course, the term “due diligence” has considerably more precise meanings. WhatIs.com’s definition for due diligence states it as:

…the process of systematically researching and verifying the accuracy of a statement. In everyday language, due diligence is synonymous with “the degree of effort required by law or industry standard.”

The term originated in the business world, where due diligence is required to validate financial statements. The goal of the process is to ensure that all stakeholders associated with a financial endeavor have the information they need to assess risk accurately.

When due diligence involves the offering of securities for purchase, as in an IPO (initial public offering), specific corporate officers are responsible for the proper completion of the process…

As is the case with so many other things in life, context matters. In general, due diligence includes the careful identification and evaluation of data sources, identification of potential risks and any other issues relevant to the statement or scenario in question.
Civil litigation and real estate law are even more specific, as you’ll read in our definition.

IT, as ever, is its own beast.

[Cartoon Credit: ScienceCartoonsPlus.com]

In the context of information technology, due diligence could mean determining whether a new operating system would be incompatible with important existing legacy applications, if a new developer understands the difference between Javascript and Java or whether new servers will fit on existing racks in a data center.

Due diligence can also be applied to careful testing of data or network security, disaster recovery preparedness, or any other critical infrastructure asset.

Failure to meet proper due diligence in these areas could leave the organization or client in question open to data breaches or malware infections.

In this sense, completing due diligence can be taken to be completing the steps that are “industry standard” in a particular area, like penetration testing or other code validation. Software companies that do not meet these goals may be liable for zero-day attacks, customer data breaches or other losses of mission-critical functions that could have been prevented with more stringent preparation.

It’s might be fair to say, for instance, that if TJX had had a better IT audit that mandated a switch to WAP instead of WEP security, one of the biggest data breaches in history might have prevented.

Or maybe not. Either way, the relevant IT guys probably should have done better due diligence before transmitting customer information over a wireless network protected only by weak encryption.

Any DB that doesn’t do due diligence testing to ensure that a database is recoverable from a major hardware of instance failure is similarly negligent.

There are plenty of examples out there. AstuteDiligence.com hosts a list of more general due diligence horror stories, with specific company and individual names redacted. There are some classic scenarios listed — the acquisition of a software company based upon a flashy demo, good PR and a well-designed website that turns out to be a maker of vaporware.

CFO Magazine ran a feature story back in ‘04 about companies that installed safeguards against merger surprises after due diligence failures.

In many circumstances, of course, due diligence works quite well, as Jan Stafford reported in a story about how a bank’s senior systems architect, sought and found a virtualization technology to help facilitate hardware consolidation and operating expenses low during system upgrades.

As Joseph Bankoff, a partner in the intellectual property and technology practice at law firm King & Spalding in Atlanta put it in a 2006 Infoworld article on the topic, “Due diligence is going in and digging a hole in the ground and seeing if there’s oil, instead of taking someone’s word on it.”

After all, you wouldn’t like it if someone else drank your milkshake.

Ah, December. The first real snow has fallen here in Boston, the malls are full of holiday shoppers and the blogosphere and pages of industry mags are full of annual summaries of the best and worst of the year in technology. We’ll be coming out with our own most notable word of the year, as you’d expect from an IT encyclopedia, so stay tuned. In the meantime, read on for a summary of some of the best (and worst) tech of 2007.

Around this time year, I laid out the top 20 IT buzzwords of 2006. To be fair, calling some of these technologies “buzzwords” now looks like a bit of a stretch, in terms of the strict definition for buzzword. Virtualization is everywhere now, in the network, server, desktop PC, storage hardware and data center. Web 2.0 may have been massively overhyped, but blogs, RSS, Ajax, wikis, podcasting and social bookmarking have all made an impact this year too, in a wave of adoption that many have now settled down to term “Enterprise 2.0.”

“2.0″ itself could be the word of the year, were it not for the discussions of Web 3.0 that led to some buzz fatigue and gentle reminders of the Semantic Web. (See this list of semantic apps for some insight into how this space is evolving).

SaaS applications from industry giants continue to be important for CRM. And at the end of every year, IT admins and CFOs alike can’t help but think of SOX compliance. Mash-ups, VoIP, BPM, 3G SOA, XML and data mining all continued to be relevant too, with nary a buzzword to be seen.

Anyone who creates, markets or sells content or services online know the value and importance of search engine optimization (SEO) by now as well.

While they didn’t make the number one spot (you’ll have to wait for that one) there’s no question that IT became greener, as tracked by the surge in spending, research — and hype. Green data centers , green computing, LEED certification, and, unfortunately, greenwashing all make the trend list.

Dealing with Vista is also right at the top of any trend list. Microsoft’s new OS has met with slow adoption and a slew of backwards compatibility headaches, and, as SearchWinIT’s Christina Torode reports, “Few Windows shops had plans for Windows Vista migrations in 2007, and it appears that there may also be little interest well into next year. Of more than 800 responses from IT managers to an online survey conducted by SearchWinIT.com, 37% said they had no plans whatsoever in place to install Vista, while 8% said they would begin adding the new desktop OS in the first quarter of 2008, and 9% expect to begin the upgrade in Q2 2008.”

So what else is new? What else mattered? If I just pulled from the words on WhatIs.com that received the most attention from you, our audience, you’d think it was dialectric materials, FUBAR , chaos theory, IEEE, heuristics, nanometers and compilers — but there’s more to the year that that!

I won’t aggregate every 2007 list here (after all, Fimoculous.com has, yet again, done a great job of pulling together 2007 lists) but following are some of the best that cover IT. You’ll find great new Websites, tools and services — exactly what we promise to provide you in this space from week to week.

Enjoy the lists — and, of course, don’t forget to subscribe to to our newsfeed for the best enterprise IT news or subscribe to our tipsfeed for the best enterprise IT tools and expert advice to help you work better and faster.

Jason Hiner takes aim at hardware and software in The 10 most important business technology products of 2007, noting the i-Mate, Sprint Xohm, Salesforce.com, Vista/Leopard, LinkedIn, Zoho Office, Cisco Telepresence, Microsoft Office 2007, OQO and the Apple iPhone.Personally, I agree with the commenters that the XO of the OLPC project should be in the conversation, though perhaps not on this list, as Jason says. I’d add OpenOffice, personally.

PCWorld misses that one too — though not many others — in this immense roundup of the Top 100 Products of 2007.

This list is a grab bag of hardware, software, Web sites and services. Techies will find plenty to quibble with — can you really compare the Intel Core 2 Duo with Pandora.com, Guitar Hero 2 and Netflix without segmenting them out — but if you’re looking for a good list of what mattered to techies and netizens alike to discover the best of the best, you could do much worse.

PCWorld also featured a terrific list of the top 100 undiscovered Web sites in August, if you missed it, along with their top 100 classic Web sites.

Some of my favorites (and now bookmarks) include Wink, Footnote, Wikisky, DZone, Programmable Web, VideoJug and Zoho and Meebo. Happy surfing!Time Magazine, in much the same vein, offers up their 50 Best Websites of 2007.

My favorites here have to be CellSwapper.com, Last.fm, Newsvine.com, Tumblr, Twitter, GrandCentral and, for some of the best laughs of the year, the outrageous FunnyOrDie.com.

If you didn’t see Will Ferrell’s “The Landlord,” you missed out. StumbleUpon is, for my money, the breakout Web site of the year, though YouTube and Facebook fans may disagree.

(Stumble this blog and find out what I mean).

I liked Mozy.com for online backup, too.

It isn’t quite a 2007 roundup but Esquire’s six ideas that will change the world offered such intriguing suggestions that I couldn’t help but mention them:

• a low energy method for getting rust nanoparticles to bind to arsenic for water purification in the developing world
• Internet “hacktivists” who use Psiphon to provide uncensored Net access to netizens stranded in regimes hostile to the free flow of information and ideas
• flexible circuits embedded in silicone skin that can be used for prostheses and wearable computers
• self-modeling robots who use the principles of natural selection found in evolutionary theory to arrive at the optimal model for a structure or mechanism
• CO2 sequestering in the deepest water of the oceans to force it to become a liquid heavier than water
• biodegradable plastic produced in an environmentally friendly way

For more in that vein, make sure to consult the pages of MIT’s Technology Review, where they list the following exciting emerging technologies:

• optical antennas and meta­materials
• peer-to-peer video,
• personalized medical monitors
• compressive sensing
• nanohealing and quantum-dot solar power
• single-cell analysis
• mobile augmented reality

On the other side of the coin, eWeek’s Brian Moore illustrated a list of technologies and services that flopped, floundered or aren’t quite ready for prime time in 2007’s Biggest Emerging Technology Disappointments. You’ll find virtual worlds, in the form of Second Life, ultramobile micro-PCs, home-based VoIP, mobile security for smartphones, IPv6, ebook reader (Hello, Kindle!), WiMax, BlueRay/HD DVD and MuniWiFi.

It’s hard to argue with the selections, though I do think that Kindle’s eInk technology offers the closest thing to a pleasant electronic reading experience yet.

Wired is calling for nominees for its 10th anniversary vaporware awards, too, if you want to get in on voting for what didn’t materialize this year.

Personally, and I know I’m burying the lede here, 2007 was the year that the network took a huge step towards being the computer, a trend acknowledged by Amazon, IBM and Microsoft in one form or another. (And yes, I’m talking about our word of the year again here.) Sun talked about that phenomenon ten years ago, though it missed an opportunity by not open sourcing Java. This model of Internet-based supercomputing, where vast stores of information and processing resources can be tapped into remotely by a laptop, PC, smartphone or other connected device is still building momentum..

2007 saw the introduction of more devices than ever before, including the gPC, iPhone and XO, that all move the user into this browser-based, Web application world, enabled and enobled by Ajax. Between open source operating systems, browsers, office productivity applications and inexpensive hardware, users and organizations can do more and create more than ever before, albeit in increasingly insecure environments.

We may take a stab at some predictions for the year ahead some time soon, once we finish digesting the year that was. Feel free to let me know what YOU think the most important trends and technologies for 2008 will be through email or in the comments.

One of WhatIs.com’s faithful readers wrote in recently with a suggestion for a much-beloved IT sniglets page (go take a look if you think words like CrackBerry, AlzIMers, IMglish or prairiedogged are a hoot): sneakernet. We love that sort of thing, of course (write to us!) but in this case we already had a definition for sneakernet: a method of transmitting electronic information by personally carrying it
from one place to another on floppy disk or other removable medium. The concepts certainly doesn’t seem many years removed from the days of copying working files onto a 3.5″ floppy disc at the end of the day in the computer room — or even of writing simple algorithms to the cassette tapes attached to the ancient PET computers next to my classroom in the late 80s.

As is so often the case, technology and life comes in cycles. In recent years, the explosion of cheap, removable flash drives (or jump drives, so some folks call them) has allowed mind-bogglingly large sneaker-borne file transfers copied over speedy USB 2.0 ports. iPod owners have long since discovered that those giganormous 80-gigabyte hard drives also make fantastic data warehouses for easy travel and transfer (as long as you don’t forget the cord!) and of course, it’s a cinch for most PC owners to burn a copy of a file to a CD and walk it over to another desk or office. That sort of thing can result in podslurping, of course, as network admins know. Entire operating systems can be carted around as LiveDistros, along with whatever portable applications a user might desire. I won’t even touch, of course, the multitude of flash memory formats that inhabit cameras, smartphones, GPS devices and other electronica, each a potential method of data transfer in “the sneakernet.”

(BTW, hat tip for the cool sneaker image goes to ProZak on Flickr)

So sneakernet is definitely not dead (as noted in this tip from SearchNetworking from 2005). The prompt provided by the reader email did, however, recall to my biological RAM an e-column I read just last week from David Pogue, the witty and frequently funny technology reviewer over at the New York Times. David recently wrote about a trip to California where he managed to forget a folder of 2 GB of digital photos he’d taken of digital SLRs he was reviewing in that week’s paper. With the help of a marvelously patient wife, he managed to get the files transferred over to his laptop from home using a nifty little shareware application called Pando. Pando provides, as David says, “a free, cross-platform, super-simple program designed expressly for idiotproof file transfers, even big ones.”

You can learn more at (you guessed it) Pando.com.

The only snag is that for the service to work, both users have to download and install the client, a step and hitch that David rightly suggests is a potential hindrance, or even impossible for some end users without admin privileges. That being said, Pando worked well for David and is allowing thousands of users to easily backup, transfer, recover and (yes) trade quite large media files. Color me a fan.

Aside from discovering Pando (thanks, David!), the process Pogue worked through is remarkably similar to one that plays out in classrooms and cubicles daily. How to do it? Sneakernet and removable storage is certainly one way, though I hear that the “Interwebs” is an attractive method these days as well. Here’s a crack at a list of ways to make a hypothetical transfer happen. If you have more ideas, please add them in the comments.

For instance, gmail has changed the way that most people think about using email to send attachments, with its remarkably large capacity (convertible to online storage, as I’ve blogged about before, with Gdisk), though I agree with David that 2 gigs is a tag weighty to send this way.

Also like David, I’ve been using FTP for a long time to download and upload files online, though I’ve endured timeouts, unexpected logouts and all manner of file corruptions over the years. I still have fond memories of the early versions of Fetch, including the happy dog icon that accompanied the app. David’s second idea, using an IM-client to transfer files, wasn’t a bad idea at all, though that kind of P2P file sharing isn’t likely to fly on many corporate networks.

As David discovered, however, IM and large files size don’t mix well for file transfer.

Command line geeks know about how to use Secure Shell (referred to as SSH or secsh) to securely access a computer remotely, a method that isn’t exactly for the technically faint of heart but allows direct access to the other computer’s directories. Rajpaul Bagga offers a Secure Shell (SSH) howto if you’re interested.

How else can you transfer large files? The list isn’t short, to be sure, even after touching on CDs, iPods, flash drives, P2P file sharing apps, FTP clients, iPods and IM.

.Mac users can also set up a public folder on their iDisks, which allows them to post large files for others to download, securing them behind password-protection as necessary.

Networking geeks can directly connect one PC to another with a crossover cable. And, as many will point out, a server or shared hard drive can be set up for file sharing as well.

You can use the IrDa port on your PDA and laptop (if they both have one!) to swap files using infrared.

And (of course) Bluetooth can be enabled to allow easy transfer between PCs, PDAs and printers, though bluesnarfing should worry users with proprietary or sensitive data.

Some smartphone users can use MMS to send files as well, most often pictures or (very short) videos taken with digital cameras. Unless you’re on an EV-DO, HSDPA or some other 3G wireless network, however, this won’t work particularly well with larger files.

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments!