This Executive Update discusses some of the reasons behind the success of the BMC Agile rollout. It reviews past decisions in light of knowledge, experience, and insights that evolved a long  time after the decisions, for better or worse, had been executed. In general, it’s about my making sense of  things and sharing the author's insights with Cutter clients.

I am on the road about 280 days a year. During my travels, I collect over 500 business cards every five to six weeks. In fact, I've been called a "bow tie wearing sensing device" by my sharper-tongued colleagues. During the past two years, I have been going door to door with senior executives to determine what the "top of the house" is really thinking about.

In the first installment of this Advisor series (Reflections on Innovation, Part I: An Idea, 29 September 2011), I suggested that you can conceive the idea of something -- its perfect,

Adopting agile as an operating methodology involves more than just operational change, it encompasses a mindset change.

Business process modeling lies at the core of all attempts to visualize and manage business processes.

Recently I had occasion to review software engineering position descriptions to try to understand what skills were sought after for entry-level software engineers. Much to my chagrin, I found that the top-level requirements, and for the most part the secondary requirements, made no mention of knowledge of how to develop secure software, how to avoid coding vulnerabilities, how to do threat modeling, and so on.

Improving the effectiveness of resource allocation decisions for cyber security is an extremely important issue, especially since resources are constrained and organizations would like to have the best security they can for their budgets. The accompanying Executive Report discusses several relevant issues to such decisions.

A recent experience with my ISP got me thinking a lot about the role social media can play in customer service and how companies looking for immediate payback may be missing the bigger picture when it comes to social media monitoring and analysis.

Making effective decisions regarding the allocation of resources for network security is a key part of business today. This Executive Report focuses on the relevant issues, including a number of questions that require special attention from CIOs and chief security officers (CSOs).

Making effective decisions regarding the allocation of resources for network security is a key part of business today. This Executive Report focuses on the relevant issues, including a number of questions that require special attention from CIOs and chief security officers (CSOs).

Making effective decisions regarding the allocation of resources for network security is a key part of business today.

Making effective decisions regarding the allocation of resources for network security is a key part of business today.

Governments utilize lawful interception (LI) as a means of law enforcement. LI consists of obtaining telecommunications data -- both the signaling information and the content of the communications themselves -- in order to identify and circumvent potential threats and crimes and to gather evidence against the perpetrators.

Governments utilize lawful interception (LI) as a means of law enforcement. LI consists of obtaining telecommunications data -- both the signaling information and the content of the communications themselves -- in order to identify and circumvent potential threats and crimes and to gather evidence against the perpetrators.

In the literary classic The Great Gatsby, Meyer Wolfsheim hints at some shady business "gonnegtions" (an intentional mispronunciation of "connections"), suggesting that there's money to be made if the protagonist is a fellow "businessman" (read: criminal). Over the past few weeks, we've seen the Occupy Wall Street movement

The "secret sauce" of agile productivity at the team level is that everyone does the most important thing at any point in time. Instead of following a rigid plan in which it takes months, and possibly years, to act on feedback, agile methods are geared toward immediacy of feedback and subsequent adaptation.

A few weeks back, I wrote an EA Advisor in which I suggested that IT architects and engineers ought to have differing roles: architects should deal with high-level design and engineers with the detail technology ("

Make no mistake (no pun intended). I realize there are hundreds of mistakes waiting out there for project managers to make, and I've probably made many of them somewhere along the way in my 25-year IT career.

We have to strip away the myths and misunderstandings about collaboration if we are going to find strategies to overcome them. And overcoming these obstacles to collaboration, while difficult, is very possible.

For several years now, so many pundits, experts, and concerned citizens of the IT world have prattled on about IT alignment with the business. So much so that whenever you hear any phrase that starts with “IT must be aligned with the business,” you already know what's coming next.

Yawn.

If your company is adopting agile methods for software development, you've probably been told you need ScrumMasters or agile coaches. But who should fill those roles? No matter the name, the essence of the role is to help teams learn new skills, continuously improve, and make the transition to a new way of working.

Architectural principles are a common part of most EA programs, but as with anything, some principles are better defined than others and some EA programs better understand the role of principles and how to use them.

For the majority of end-user organizations, analyzing unstructured data for BI and other decision-support needs is still a fairly new practice; it's of serious interest but, at this stage, primarily in the investigation and experimentation stages.

This Executive Report examines current research by my colleagues and I regarding the outsourcing and innovation practices of 26

In just over 20 years, the IT outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) markets have grown to exceed US $420 billion in annual revenues globally. In that time, research studies have shown growing success where limited outsourcing objectives on cost and service have been pursued. However, the record on innovation, cost-plus innovation, and strategic advantage from outsourcing has been more disappointing.