After four decades of failing to manage data assets in an enterprise-wide fashion, organizations are suffering from data chaos. As a result, they are unable to determine the true value of their customers, gauge business unit and enterprise performance, react to market conditions quickly and accurately, and — in some cases — even stay in business. So how can IT best support business decision making in the current data morass? Must we commit to the painfully slow and costly process of building and maintaining a data warehouse (DW), or will that leave behind too many business units that need their data “yesterday”? If we attempt BI without a DW, will we simply spawn more BI silo applications, making our present data woes even worse?

Next month, we’ll look at both sides of the BI debate. You’ll hear from one author who claims the “democratization” of BI has made the enterprise-wide DW irrelevant. You’ll hear from others who predict “serious negative consequences” if organizations abandon the DW — and argue that agile data techniques allow you to throw out the “bureaucratic bathwater” while keeping the DW “baby.” Whether you consider the DW an unnecessary impediment or BI’s best hope, you’ll find plenty of thought-provoking discussion in the April issue of Cutter IT Journal.

Business architecture is the link between business and technology, current and future — especially future. In recent years, IT has been devoted to cutting costs and people. Today IT must show how it will add value and flexibility to the organization’s structure. With global competition on the rise, companies have to adapt to rapidly changing conditions — world-class, forward-looking IT is a necessity. Business architecture is a key tool for aligning technology with current/future business goals and aligning business with current/future technology opportunities.

In this issue we'll examine business architecture, an IT issue that’s moving to the front burner in many organizations. Hear how the Wealth Management Group at Wells Fargo launched a highly successful business architecture program through a combination of BPM and “servant leadership.” Learn what attributes are required in a great business architect, whether you’re seeking the “horizontal” or “vertical” model. Discover how poorly aligned enterprise governance structures can hamper business architecture deployment — and how you can sidestep the problem by embracing collaborative governance. If you’re in the market for strategic transformation, don’t miss this issue of Cutter IT Journal.

The use of IT has exploded in all areas of human activity, offering immense benefits and convenience -- and serious threats to the environment. IT infrastructure consumes significant amounts of electricity, placing a heavy burden on electric grids and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, computers pose severe environmental problems both during manufacture and at disposal. Calls to address the issue are increasing; IT is part of the environmental problem and therefore must be part of the solution.

Next month, we'll explore the trend toward "green IT." You'll learn how to meet the seemingly conflicting demands of both energy efficiency and information security. You'll hear about software that can help you navigate the complex -- and growing -- thicket of environmental regulation. And you'll learn how to implement a sustainable IT movement within your company that can increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and provide real competitive advantage. Whether driven by rising energy costs, regulatory mandates, or genuine concern for the planet, a growing number of businesses are "going green." Tune in next month and discover how you can join them.

We live in a world dominated by information, in which knowledge is power and learning is the means to survival. As a result, organizations are supporting an ever-growing mix of learning activities and methods. To meet rapidly changing business requirements and the needs of an increasingly diverse and often dispersed learner population, organizations are looking for ways to leverage technology to not only deliver, manage, and report on learning activities, but also to manage their creation. Learning management systems (LMSs) and learning content management systems (LCMSs) can do exactly that.

In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we’ll delve into the world of e-learning applications. You’ll learn about a detailed selection process that can help you get the best LMS/LCMS for your organization. You’ll discover how to leverage Web 2.0 concepts to compose instructional content on the fly and customize it for a particular learner. And you’ll hear how to target learning initiatives to key contributing behaviors so you can “move the numbers” that really matter to the organization. As the Chinese proverb says, “Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.” Join us and learn how to keep your organization’s boat going in the right direction.

2007

Following quickly on the heels of Web 2.0 comes Enterprise 2.0. Loosely described as a set of collaborative technologies that work both inside the company’s boundaries and across partners and customers outside the company, Enterprise 2.0 is gaining in popularity. Industry conferences and trade magazines have been prattling on about how these technologies will transform businesses. But is Enterprise 2.0 just hype, or is it here to stay? In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we’ll discuss the world of social computing beyond YouTube and MySpace. You’ll learn what separates Enterprise 2.0 from Web 2.0 -- and the advantages each one can offer the enterprise sector. You’ll hear from one author who believes that not only have the fundamental rules of business not changed, they are also the best way to understand how Enterprise 2.0 practices and technologies can benefit your firm. And you’ll discover how to walk the line between “peer production” and “private value” to reap competitive advantage from Enterprise 2.0. Tune in and join a (potential) revolution already in progress.

Business process management (BPM) is a concept that has been around in the IT world for many years under various names and labels. Business users are led to believe that they can effortlessly, without IT intervention, change business processes on the fly and quickly assemble new business processes from predefined "building blocks" as their business changes. Is the BPM hype justified, or have we not made much progress since BPM's inception in the 1990s?

In next month's issue, we will explore the current state of BPM and the challenges organizations face as they attempt to implement BPM strategies. You'll learn how to use workflow patterns to benchmark the capabilities of BPM technology offerings so you can select the tool that's best for your organization. You'll hear how Schlumberger, a multimillion-dollar oilfield services company, put six vendors of BPM suites through their paces -- and found them all wanting. In contrast, you'll also learn how the Massachusetts Medical Society has implemented a BPM strategy to manage processes as diverse as its online e-commerce business flows to its time-off request process with great success. Join us next month to find out what BPM can -- or can't quite -- do for you.

Agility and Innovation

Can agility foster innovation? Well, maybe not entirely by itself, but maintaining an agile business culture and employing agile practices can improve your organization's ability to innovative rapidly and effectively. This, however, is not without its challenges.

In this issue, we explore how agile leaders can help to create and sustain an environment in which others can be innovative, creative, and successful. Learn how agile practices, when properly wielded, can serve as powerful tools for effectively managing the inherent risk in product innovation. Hear how agile methodologies were effectively employed in four large financial institutions on large, cross-enterprise strategic projects, resulting in the efficient use of capital, the creation of exercisable options, and risk mitigation. Discover how the use of open source development in tandem with agile processes can facilitate innovation and result in higher productivity, improved quality, faster time to market, and prevention of vendor lock-in. And on the other side of the coin, be privy to a case study of a company that lost its innovative investment while using agile methods. Join us as we explore how to best maximize agile practices to support innovation!

The concept of master data management (MDM) is hardly new — organizations have been struggling with ways to gather and maintain clear, concise, accurate, and consistent information for years. So why has MDM resurfaced with such urgency now?

Two words: global competition. Today’s competitive global markets will not permit key reporting facts and performance indicators to lag days and months behind as they once did. Two more words: Sarbanes-Oxley (and Basel II). The compulsory reporting requirements businesses now face have forced them to seek improved levels of accuracy in order to avoid the painful consequences of poor reporting.

In next month’s issue, we explore how a robust MDM strategy can help companies identify and coordinate common data across the enterprise. You’ll hear how one organization avoided the "one-version-of-the-truth trap" by combining a status attribute with standard data definitions, enabling department-specific views of the data while maintaining overall consistency. And you’ll discover that not only is it possible to analzye legacy data sources, collect metadata, and support development teams in an evolutionary manner, you really have no choice in the matter! Join us next month to discover the best ways to get your data house in order.

If enterprises hope to thrive in today’s constantly evolving business environment, they will have to innovate. And to innovate, their knowledge workers are going to have to work together — to collaborate — to meet market opportunities with competitive products and services. But while collaboration relies on open communication and an atmosphere of trust, it doesn’t mean sitting in a circle holding hands and singing Kumbaya. In this issue, we’ll discuss how you can promote collaboration in your organization to produce business results. Hear about one team that was handed a project a year behind schedule and a quarter-million dollars in the hole. After collaboratively replanning the entire project, self-assigning tasks, and fending off the command-and-control encroachments of the larger organization, the team delivered the project within budget and ahead of schedule. Discover how to "lift others" and "increase safety" in order to maximize people’s contributions, but also how to close down discussions that have gone off topic so you can continue to make progress. There’s a fine line between "Two heads are better than one" and "Too many cooks spoil the broth" — join us and learn how you can walk that line.

Back in the 1990s, IT was considered the genie in the lamp. Want to revise a business process or achieve some other information goal? Just turn the problem over to IT, which will somehow magically make it happen.

Over a decade later, the bloom is definitely off the rose. Today there are many views as to how involved IT should be in business strategy. Nicholas Carr and his acolytes say IT's role is merely to do what the business says should be done as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Others believe that IT can enable competitive advantage by converting new capabilities into better products faster than competitors and by quickly translating know-how into business value.

Join us next month as we debate the ways IT can -- or can't -- enable business strategy. Learn how to determine whether your IT organization is a strategic enabler or a tactical one -- and how those roles can change over time. Discover how one IT group went from providing basic services to participating in a true business partnership thanks to its "well-formed strategy statements" and savvy industry scanning. If you'd rather be contributing innovative ideas instead of simply executing what you've been handed, don't miss next month's issue!

SOA has been the hottest topic in software for the past two or three years, and it looks as if it will be enjoying that status for the indefinite future. This is because SOA is seen not just as a new software architecture, but as a powerful way of reorganizing business enterprises. SOA experts stress the importance of breaking up the monolithic control that central IT has usually exercised over corporate computing in order to put separate divisions, lines of business, and departments in charge of their own services. This is all very well, but if SOA is the royal road to better alignment between business and IT, then exactly how will this alignment come about?

In next month's issue of Cutter IT Journal, we will explore the implications of SOA adoption for corporate and IT governance. You'll find a roadmap for transforming an unstructured legacy application landscape into an enterprise SOA. You'll discover how managing business assets using Universal Business Identifiers (UBIs) will cause new development and initiatives to concentrate around business assets that deliver real value. SOA has been called "the answer to an enterprise architect's dream" — join us next month to learn how to keep it from becoming a nightmare in your organization.

We can all picture the typical agile project: a small collocated team working on a medium-critical, user-centric system, probably written in some object-oriented language or other. But what about those other kinds of projects? Are agile methods off limits if your project is being developed by a globally distributed team? If your system is life-critical? If you find yourself in a process-oriented or highly regulated organization?

Join us as we discuss projects that venture beyond agile's terra cognita. Learn how the short iterations of agile projects are even more important in a global environment (as are feature-driven development and daily synchronizations). Hear how an upstart agile team in one of the US's largest companies learned to peacefully coexist with its waterfall-following brethren. Discover how globally distributed projects can succeed by embracing agile values rather than blindly following practices used by collocated teams. So get ready to saddle up as we explore the agile frontier.

Information availability has changed all aspects of marketing and, indeed, all aspects of competitive strategy. Today's customers are not merely aware; they now enjoy true informedness. They know what products and services are available in the marketplace, they know where to find them and from whom, they have a better idea than ever before of the products precise attributes, and they know exactly what they will cost. As a result, traditional mass-market fat spots are seeing their profitability erode. The real change -- resonance marketing -- is reflected in the fact that consumers are getting items that profoundly appeal to them.

Can companies take refuge in the long tail? Can they really thrive by selling less of more? Join us next month as we examine the long tail phenomenon. Discover how resonance products create strong demand and loyalty. Learn how you can increase user satisfaction and even wring more revenue out of your existing products by simply getting consumers to use the higher-level features already available to them. And learn how you can achieve profitability by providing a well-designed portfolio of services. Tune in next month so you won't get caught on the tail end of the long tail trend.

Innovation is all the rage in the IT world these days. Consulting firms promise to tell you how to innovate. Companies that were gun-shy after the “tech bubble” burst are now looking for emerging information technologies that can positively impact their bottom line. At a time when more and more manufacturing and service activities are being sent to low-wage countries, organizations wonder, “Can innovation be our salvation?” We’re willing to bet that it is. Join us next month as we discuss ways to foster IT innovation. Learn how one university encourages innovation among its faculty, students, and staff with a conscious policy of “IT abundance.” Are innovative ideas in short supply in your company? Find out how open source collaboration and “external models of innovation” can provide the creative ferment you lack. Discover how to turn good ideas into pilots and — even more important — how to keep both unsuccessful and successful pilots from remaining in “pilot mode” forever, thus taxing your ability to innovate in the future. A creative spark is a terrible thing to waste — tune in next issue and learn how to make those sparks catch fire.

What mix of skills and expertise makes for a good CIO? Over the years, there have been many lively arguments on the subject. While some believe that a CIO with no formal training or long-term experience in IT is not a "real" CIO, others contend that companies are looking first and foremost for executive leadership. In this issue, we’ll consider the makings of a successful CIO. Hear how CIOs must be able to reason about IT and think strategically — and how these abilities will get you nowhere without the political instincts and skills to survive. Discover how one company healed the business/IT breach through a coaching program that produced the business technology leadership it so desperately needed. Learn how 21st-century CIOs will succeed only if they learn to "de-massify" their investments and embrace "forever learning." Join us as we search for the dream CIO: someone who can keep the lights on and use them to illuminate new paths for the business.

Cutter IT Journal first took a look at Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and similar governance mandates back in our September 2005 issue. Back then, we focused the debate on the potential value, costs, impacts, and implications of compliance with such laws and regulations. In this, we discover how SOX compliance initiatives are turning out in the real world. Is SOX the costcreating, value-destroying nightmare everyone feared? Or has it yielded what it promised — stronger internal controls, better documentation of financial and business processes, and more board involvement in corporate direction?

Sourcing: Out or In?

Many people think of outsourcing as a way to cut costs, but after nearly two decades of global outsourcing, we know that outsourcing initiatives don't always yield the expected value. In this issue, we'll explore the many factors organizations must address when deciding where best to source IT services. You'll hear how one company's single-minded focus on cost cutting led it to kill the project that laid its golden eggs -- and how its competitors stand to benefit as a result. You'll learn techniques for designing successful outsourcing relationships so your initiatives deliver their promised value. And you'll discover that, when it comes to offshoring, much of what you "know" about outsourcing just isn't true. Whether your developers are down the hall or across the world, you'll want to join us this month for a lively debate on this always hot-button issue.

Avoiding Privacy Pitfalls

More than ever, companies are responsible for ensuring the privacy of the personally identifiable information (PII) in their care. The fact that PII is often in the hands of personnel using powerful mobile computers and storage devices away from corporate facilities only complicates matters. Not surprisingly, information security and privacy incidents are on the rise, along with growing public awareness of them. What is a company to do?

Join us as we visit the thorny world of privacy, a place where overlapping and unclear legal obligations, "situational" customer preferences, technical challenges, and management risks abound. Discover how you can use anonymization techniques to protect sensitive data during storage and transit, when data may be at highest risk of being attacked. Learn how to reduce the risk of a privacy breach by building privacy into applications that manage sensitive data. And while "dead men tell no tales," dead computers do. Find out what you can do to ensure your discarded equipment goes silent to the grave.

Web 2.0

Once dismissed as a vacuous Silicon Valley buzzword, Web 2.0 is gradually becoming recognized as an important collection of technologies, business strategies, and social trends. In this, we will discuss the technologies and concepts that underlie Web 2.0 — and what they mean for the enterprise. Learn how to resolve vexing issues of online trust, identity, and reputation so your organization and its customers don’t fall prey to online fraud. Discover how you can use Web 2.0 techniques to enrich your enterprise BI applications, leading to increased user adoption and greater application "intelligence." And find out how you can form and sustain a vibrant product community that will improve your ability to deliver the right software at the right time. The "next new thing" is here — is your organization ready to take advantage of it?

Organizing IT: What's the Right Structure?

The structure of the IT organization is an important factor in supporting a company's ability to respond to market forces and compete effectively. Clearly, IT should be organized in a way that will deliver the most value to the firm, but choosing an organizational structure is not easy. In this issue, we'll examine the different organizational choices for IT so that you can determine which one will work best for your company. Is your primary strategic objective profit? Asset utilization? Growth? Find out which IT organizational structure best fits each of these strategic directions. Learn how pairing business product teams with their own dedicated IT units can produce high-output team velocity combined with ever-growing domain knowledge and experience. Finally, discover how adopting a sports team's approach to recruiting, specialized positions, coaching, and retention can turn your IT organization into a winning franchise.

Putting the Intelligence Back into Business Intelligence

We've been working on business intelligence (BI) for going on 20 years now. Yet many executives and managers still can't get what they need from their data analysis tools. They wish they had better prognostic capabilities. They wish they had predictive models that would notify them about potential problems or risks before they occur. They wish, in short, for intelligent business intelligence. In this issue, we'll debate how best to give it to them. You'll discover how you can stand out from the BI crowd by putting meaning and interest ahead of available data and consistency. You'll learn why BI technology will get you nowhere without a clear data strategy -- and how you can craft yours. Be sure to join us this month for advice on increasing your organization's business intelligence quotient.

Do Agilists Understand Requirements?

Business needs change, the competitive landscape changes, so system requirements must also be able to change if we want to deliver software that satisfies our customers. That's agile development in a nutshell, right? But what if we're so focused on the rapid development of working software "trees" that we don't see the "forest" of business requirements? In this issue we debate whether agilists really get requirements -- and what to do about it if they don't. Learn how to encourage the software "hallucinations" that produce breakthrough products and squelch those that lead developers down treacherous paths. Hear how agile projects can incorporate high-level planning to identify the real needs of the business - and still avoid "analysis paralysis." Discover requirements methods that keep it light and get it right.

CRM: The Next Five Years

At the heart of customer relationship management (CRM) is the customer, and knowing the customer is key. In this issue you’ll learn why it's vital to determine not just the customer’s propensity to buy but her capacity to buy — and why companies whose CRM systems leverage broader market data and predictive analytics will surpass those that get their CRM functionality out of a box. Discover how surging adoption of consumer-generated media provides unprecedented windows into consumer preferences and real-time behaviors. Find out how open source software may put CRM capability within the reach of more companies than ever before. Will the future of CRM be Oracle and SAP hegemony or the unfiltered business intelligence of the blogosphere? Join us next month to see what’s ahead for CRM.

Securing Cyberspace, Part II

In the first installment of "Securing Cyberspace," we asked, "Is it time to rethink our strategy?" The answer was a resounding "yes." In this issue, our authors discuss a bevy of innovative ways we can protect our cyber infrastructure, from managing cyber risk through cyber insurance to reengineering the base protocols of TCP/IP. Discover how to write service agreements that can help you achieve effective information security in your organization. Learn why companies must move with all deliberate speed to adopt information security best practices (hint: so government mandates don’t force them to).

IT Performance Management/CIO Dashboard

Why are seminars on measuring IT performance so well attended but implementation of performance management programs so rare? Could it be that we are afraid to manage IT like a business? Tune as we look IT performance management full in the face — and live to tell the tale. Our expert authors show you how to design a dashboard with leading indicators that help you take action. You’ll discover how to identify true KPIs (and eliminate mere metrics). You’ll learn how the wrong dashboard can destroy performance, demotivate your people, and mask serious problems — and what you can do to avoid this fate. Join us for a lively discussion of ways to measure IT performance so you can manage it.

Enterprise Architecture: Best Practices?

Whether they're driven by the need for business-IT alignment, the spread of service-oriented architectures, or other factors, enterprise architecture (EA) programs are clearly proliferating. In this month's Cutter IT Journal, you'll see how Subaru's EA effort transformed a maze of overlapping applications and unsupported technology platforms into a simple, flexible IT environment that keeps pace with changing business needs. You'll learn how architects can get agile developers to actually heed their advice — rather than shunning them. And you'll discover an agile "middle path" that can help you avoid the extremes of perfection and chaos in your own EA efforts. Join us for a lively discussion of the best practices that lead to EA success.

The Role of Strategy, Planning, and Budgeting in an Agile Organization

Not all organizations are in agreement about the critical nature of strategy, planning, and budgeting in an agile business environment. Applying traditional approaches for the sake of meeting objectives oftentimes results in misdirected managerial attention, the stifling of innovation and creativity, and the inability to focus on new priorities. How can strategy, planning, and budgeting processes be redefined to better support agile methods? This inspiring debate replete with best practices and guidelines for meeting the dynamic business objectives of an agile organization.

Securing Cyber Space: Is it Time to Rethink Our Strategy?

Global efforts to stem the tide of cybersecurity breaches are an ongoing uphill battle. The annual costs of digital attacks are rising. Join us to learn what steps your organization should take to address the daily occurrences of spam, spyware, zombie networks, DOS attacks, online extortion, IP theft, viruses, worms, and physical and cyber data breaches. You’ll receive best practices for investing in cybersecurity, a detailed look at the Build Security in Software Assurance Initiative, a proven approach to enhancing planning for security during implementation and sustainment, and more. Don't miss this timely edition of Cutter IT Journal