"Leadership yoga" -- flipping the organization upside down to have their eyes to the ground to see the grass roots, where the next opportunities are starting to grow. -- Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor

In my last Advisor ("Change Management 3.0, Part I"), I introduced the Change Management 3.0 "supermodel," which encompasses a few smaller well-known models of change, where each model addresses one of the following

Social BI and analytics has many unique challenges: unstructured data, Big Data, separating useful from useless data, data analysis and presentation, and so on.

Small is beautiful in software. But that beauty conflicts with "the beast" -- the many rules, regulations, processes, stage gates, committees, compliance imperatives, and audits that inevitably accompany large-scale software projects. Big Agile can reconcile the systemic conflict between the two, preserving the beauty while taming the beast.

Agile approaches have clearly proven themselves with small, colocated teams developing reasonably straightforward solutions.

While I normally wouldn't apply construction analogies to software development, I do think they have a place when it comes to rolling out an agile process to a large-scale product or system development organization.

First, the bad news. If someone in your firm is unwilling or unable to provide the focused leadership needed to build cross-functional relationships, don't try to scale agile -- and especially don't go "Big Agile"!

There are many examples from other arts and crafts that lead one to believe that discipline is good for art.

Big Agile is "agile as far as the eye can see." It is not "one Big Agile organization." The distinction becomes clear when you consider the context of size: team versus whole organization.

In 1962, NASA's programmers made a small but drastic mistake.

The story of Saint Patrick is an epic unto itself; not because of the miracles wrought, but because of his remarkable savvy about those around him. St. Patrick is attributed with converting the whole of Ireland -- the only such recorded Christian missionary to do so without bloodshed. How did he achieve this wonder?

This issue is the seventh annual CBR issue on IT trends. We have the opportunity here not only to "take the pulse" of the IT industry on various topics — adoption levels, HR activities, IT management strategies, and more — but also to compare this year's snapshot with the past six years, giving us insight into the ever-changing landscape of business technology.

This time next year, looking back at 2012, we will remember it as the year Facebook spectacularly went public, HTML5 really took off, and IT unemployment continued to drop. While analysts have begun using phrases like "bubble" to describe what's happening in the IT world, that sort of optimism doesn't describe the feelings of business leaders when asked about the economy. Consequently, IT leaders such as those we surveyed for this year's annual CBR focusing on IT trends, the seventh installment of our series, are more cautious.

What a year we had in 2011! At the end of 2012, I predict we will look back and say, "2011 was nothing compared to what just took place in 2012."

This survey explored interest in, and adoption of, various relatively new IT technologies and initiatives and investigated staffing and outsourcing trends in 78 organizations worldwide. Fifty percent of responding organizations are headquartered in North America, 24% in Asia/Australia/Pacific, and 17% in Europe, with the remainder in South America, Africa, and the Middle East.

One of the major patterns we frequently observe is an organization that "plays agile" instead of being agile. The pattern follows a basic theme.

Since publication of the Cutter Business Enterprise Architecture Executive Report "Establishing the Business Architecture Practice: A Case Study" (Vol. 15, No.

No matter how disciplined a company is about its IT governance, the average enterprise has many years of legacy applications in its portfolio that need to be rationalized.

No matter how disciplined a company is about its IT governance, the average enterprise has many years of legacy applications in its portfolio that need to be rationalized.

Back in 2010, in a report on mobile BI (see BI Unwired: The Case for Mobile, Vol. 10, No. 9), I commented on a mobile BI application in use at that time at global nutrition company Herbalife.

Back in 2010, in a report on mobile BI (see BI Unwired: The Case for Mobile, Vol. 10, No. 9), I commented on a mobile BI application in use at that time at global nutrition company Herbalife.

In this Executive Update, I explore the need to develop and encourage collaboration, which has become increasingly urgent in recent years as organizations confront the changing realities of the modern world.

We have all witnessed profound implications and disruptive shifts during the past decades when the power of emergence is unleashed because of leveling.

I haven't the slightest idea how to change people,but I still keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out. -- David Sedaris, American writer (1956-)

One of the topics in technology news these days is Big Data. So that raises a few questions. First, what do we mean by Big Data? And then, more pertinent to this Advisor, what are the architectural issues with which we should be concerned?