In my more recent engagements, I have had the opportunity to move away from consulting within the infrastructure world of SOA and into the realm of pure business process management (BPM). Prior to that, I had more of a conceptual appreciation as to how BPM technology could integrate within an SOA.

When you begin preparing any substantial type of communication whether verbal (i.e., presentation) or written (i.e., detailed email,) you likely start by thinking about content: what you want to say.

Habits form an important and inevitable part of our lives. We are all about baselining our routine activities into habits and conserving our energy for more productive and interesting tasks. These habits exist as patterns in customer behavior data (e.g., clickstream, logs, social media, sales). The right kind of data, aided by an intelligent analytical solution, can identify these habits and yield valuable customer insights.

The data warehouse, unlike the other IT systems in an enterprise, is an exclusive data platform with a data model as its backbone. In general, one may conceive an IT system to be a combination of processes and data.

In my last Advisor ("Reflections on Innovation — Part V: Words, Words, Words"), I suggested that you read Ian McGilchrist's book The Master and His Emissary, where McGilchri

A lively debate about the nature of the agile process often erupts in my executive workshops. Participants, who have not been exposed to agile methods, usually expect the software process (or any process, for that matter) to be predictable.

One of the most important skills of an architect (be it a business architect, IT architect, or enterprise architect) is that of “critical thinking.” It has been defined by the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking as: "the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or gener

One of the most important skills of an architect (be it a business architect, IT architect, or enterprise architect) is that of “critical thinking.” 

Companies have used Hadoop mainly to process high volumes of unstructured data for Internet operations.

Companies have used Hadoop mainly to process high volumes of unstructured data for Internet operations.

Frameworks provide the theoretical backbone for architecture, but they are often perceived as too abstract with little direct relevance to the architect's daily routine.

Although some may argue that IT's capacity to contribute to business competitiveness has faded, we suggest instead that it has evolved and expanded, maturing and changing within a subset of companies that have effectively managed to use IT in various ways. In this two-part Executive Report series, we examine the status of the use of IT to improve organizational capabilities and promote business value, identifying varieties of use and directional trends as well as managerial challenges and critical success factors through five case studies.

In my previous Advisor ("Inflection Points for Decisions and Profit, Part I"), I pointed out that all exchanges of goods and services are exchanges of risk and opportunity between the pa

Although some may argue that IT's capacity to contribute to business competitiveness has faded, we suggest instead that it has evolved and expanded, maturing and changing within a subset of companies that have effectively managed to use IT in various ways. In this two-part Executive Report series, we examine the status of the use of IT to improve organizational capabilities and promote business value, identifying varieties of use and directional trends as well as managerial challenges and critical success factors through five case studies. Here in Part I, we explore the first two: the Boeing 787 and JPMorgan Chase.

Although some may argue that IT's capacity to contribute to business competitiveness has faded, we suggest instead that it has evolved and expanded, maturing and changing within a subset of companies that have effectively managed to use IT in various ways. In this two-part Executive Report series, we examine the status of the use of IT to improve organizational capabilities and promote business value, identifying varieties of use and directional trends as well as managerial challenges and critical success factors through five case studies.

Common wisdom in process improvement efforts includes the notion of a "sponsor." The sponsor is a person (sometimes a small group of people) within an organization who buys into -- often literally as much as figuratively -- the improvement effort.

As business architecture becomes more mainstream, many large and complex enterprises across the private and public sectors are embracing its primary concepts. For most of these organizations, BA plays a significant role in defining the primary value proposition for the enterprise architecture.

Somewhere in prehistoric times, a clever ancestor stumbled upon the advantages of applying shareable knowledge to common problems. Thus, collaboration was born.

Somewhere in prehistoric times, a clever ancestor stumbled upon the advantages of applying shareable knowledge to common problems. Thus, collaboration was born.

Many are calling the advent of apps a revolution, as important as the arrival of the personal computer. How ironic that we have started to call such app-running devices as smartphones and tablets, the post-PC devices. Given today's heightened awareness and revolutionary swing of this topic, of course the CBR crew had to focus on it. In this issue, we are benchmarking the use of apps to understand the transition from the PC to the post-PC era.

Of the more than 4 billion mobile phones in use across the world, around 27% are smartphones, phones built on a mobile computing platform with advanced computing ability and connectivity.

While smartphones have become ubiquitous and mobile consumers have downloaded more than 28 billion apps from Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market,1 many businesses around the globe are lagging behind -- slow to adopt the use of smartphones and even slower still to embrace a fully integrated mobile strategy. Considering that consumers are downloading and using mobile applications that equate to four for every person on the planet, businesses must radically transform their idea of customers and the marketplace or risk strategic catastrophe.

As most successful business managers will tell you, moving forward with the times is the only way to avoid falling behind them. The next big thing on the horizon all too quickly becomes the current big thing for which you need to have a strategic plan in place by the time it really rolls around.

This survey investigated organizations' use, development, and implementation of smartphone apps. Forty percent of the 79 respondents are from Asia/Australia/Pacific, 29% from North America, and 24% from Europe, with the remainder from Africa, the Middle East, and South America.

In my previous Advisor we described enterprise architecture (EA) and portfolio management (PM) ("Putting Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management Together, Part I").