This workshop provides a greater understanding of the Agile approach in the context of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence projects.

This workshop provides a greater understanding of the Agile approach in the context of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence projects.

What we need is a description of hacking that omits the good/bad distinction because, as this Executive Update points out, exactly the same activities can be positive or negative. This Update provides a judgment-neutral guide to hacking to help you understand what hacking is about and how to facilitate its use (for good) and prevent its misuse.

What we need is a description of hacking that omits the good/bad distinction because, as this Executive Update points out, exactly the same activities can be positive or negative. This Update provides a judgment-neutral guide to hacking to help you understand what hacking is about and how to facilitate its use (for good) and prevent its misuse.

From the time most people are able to put together their first cogent thoughts, the question arises: Who do you want to be when you grow up? It's a simple enough concept. Do we want to be firefighters? Captains of industry? Doctors? Lawyers? Astronauts? But as we achieve a reasonable level of maturity, we come to the realization that we simply want to be happy with ourselves and with the world around us.

In part IV of this series, we explored how alignment leads to autonomy (see "Implementing the Integrative Framework, Part IV -- Autonomy"). We now shift our focus to empowerment as the last "ingredient" in the (Scalability -> Alignment -> Autonomy -> Empowerment) cycle. It is this full cycle that makes the integrative framework so powerful.

The pattern I propose for a service assurance architecture is based on ideas taken from the operations support system (OSS) developed in the 1980s and 1990s. The original OSS, created for the telecommunications industry, covered a broad range of subjects and considered networking systems. The pattern presented here narrows the scope of interest to service assurance and casts the OSS principles into the IT systems area.

A recent Cutter Consortium survey that asked 80 organizations (worldwide) about their plans for the Internet of Things (IoT) helps provide some insight into how organizations are responding to the introduction of the Apple Watch and the growing consumer use of smart watches in general.

A recent Cutter Consortium survey that asked 80 organizations (worldwide) about their plans for the Internet of Things (IoT) helps provide some insight into how organizations are responding to the introduction of the Apple Watch and the growing consumer use of smart watches in general.

The IT community has a huge stake in minimizing the probability and severity of any backlash. One major asset is that their executives are, on the whole, more publicly respected than their counterparts in most other industries. They have bully pulpits that they can and should use to get in front of both technical and broader sociopolitical issues likely to bring on or intensify backlash.

Conventional wisdom holds that alignment and autonomy are contradictory. This is a false dichotomy. Alignment actually enables autonomy by providing each and every project team with its goals, measures, and boundaries. The project team is strongly encouraged to operate independently within its own context. As long as a project teams has a well-specified set of clearly derived measures, it can do what it needs to do to achieve its measures without the interference of external management.

I was recently discussing the possibility of writing up some success stories, about enterprise architecture initiatives in particular, with a young colleague who then asked me: "And do you have any anti-success stories to tell?" Leaving aside his interesting choice of words, perhaps unconsciously aimed at avoiding the dreaded word "failure," this made be think of several cases where my clients snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory, so to speak, and what lessons we (or our clients) can derive from them.

The data lake is an evolutionary development of the increasing need to process unstructured data and huge stores of structured and semistructured feeds from machine processes and automation. It needs to be integrated with existing database and data warehousing solutions, whose processing and output is essential to analytics tasks. At the same time, the data lake needs to conform to the structural and security requirements of the firm.

The data lake is an evolutionary development of the increasing need to process unstructured data and huge stores of structured and semistructured feeds from machine processes and automation. It needs to be integrated with existing database and data warehousing solutions, whose processing and output is essential to analytics tasks. At the same time, the data lake needs to conform to the structural and security requirements of the firm.

If you want to get the most for your organizational improvement money, spend it on your champions. Find those who already believe; those who want the change. Rather than spend energy, money, and resources on the naysayers who would rather celebrate your failure, focus on the champions. Put your energy, money, and resources behind those who not only say "yes" but "heck yes!" to the change.