Most employers opt to monitor what their employees do while at work. The employer's interest is to ensure that the employees perform their jobs adequately and refrain from performing harmful actions, either intentional or unintentional, that may harm the company. A few examples of such harmful actions, which an employer might want to be alerted to and potentially circumvent, include the following:

Have you ever overloaded your dishwasher? You focus completely on getting every last dish and every last glass and every last utensil loaded. Then you breathe a sigh of relief as you press "start." An hour later, as the wash cycle completes, you return to find that the dishes and glasses and utensils aren't really clean.

The latest big news to rock the BI and data warehousing world is Oracle's Exalytics BI Machine, which was introduced at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, California.

In June/July 2011, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking 61 end-user organizations about the adoption and use of text mining and analysis.

In June/July 2011, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking 61 end-user organizations about the adoption and use of text mining and analysis.

The processes for developing strategic plans are well known, and entire books have been written on the topic.

The processes for developing strategic plans are well known. There are several approaches and variations, and many books are written on the topic. But once the strategic plan is in place, the process of maintaining alignment of the project portfolio to the strategic plan remains a challenge for most organizations.

One of many shibboleths in our business is "work closely with the business." Ways this can happen is to participate with business in its planning meetings, engage it in business-based conversations about requirements, get traction on what the business strategies really are, and so on.

In my last Business & Enterprise Architecture Advisor ("

This must be a question that tugs on CEOs, CIOs, VPs, and PMO directors at every company across the nation and around the world whenever they consider PM staffing. Wouldn't it be? PMP certification -- the most well-known and widely regarded certification in the project management world -- is a great default requirement, right? Require certification of all your incoming project managers -- and require that your current ones get certified in the next year -- and you're set, right? If you've required the industry standard, how can you go wrong?

Is Web 3.0 just hype, or are people actually working with these technologies? Do people even understand what Web 3.0 is?

Several years ago, I wrote a short article on planning in agile projects that dispelled the notion that agile practices did not include much planning. 1 Agile has moved on,

The passing of Steve Jobs on 5 October 2011 has affected all of us involved with IT to some extent, whether we use Apple products or not. Jobs was an innovator who changed consumer interaction with computing and how computer products are developed. As working IT professionals, the Cutter Business Technology Council recognizes Jobs’s genius and his impact on today’s computing environment. Each contributor to this omnibus Council Opinion shares his or her personal tribute to the computing pioneer who was Steve Jobs.

It is quite a common occurrence in my practice: I step into an engagement that involves hundreds of developers, testers, product managers, project managers, architects, user design specialists, and quite a few other disciplines, from all over the globe. The time zone difference between some of their most important sites is 10, 11, or 12 hours. The expectations of whatever agile software method I bring to bear is that it will improve quality, productivity, and time to market.

I call this series of Advisors "Reflections on Innovation." There's plenty of writing on innovation that tells you what it is, how you must do it, and even suggests ways to predict the outcome of your process. That's an industrial approach, and I'm unsympathetic to its aims and methods.

SOA remains an important area for development and enterprise implementation but recent trends in social computing, mobility, user-developed applications, and the cloud have significantly upstaged SOA, as we explore in this Executive Update.

How would you feel if you owned a Ferrari and couldn't get it out of first gear? That's exactly what's happening in many companies when it comes to collaborative technologies.

How would you feel if you owned a Ferrari and couldn't get it out of first gear? That's exactly what's happening in many companies when it comes to collaborative technologies.

It is quite a common occurrence in my practice: I step into an engagement that involves hundreds of developers, testers, product managers, project managers, architects, user design specialists, and quite a few other disciplines, from all over the globe. The time zone difference between some of their most important sites is 10, 11, or 12 hours.

In my last Advisor ("Principles of Design: Part I" 14 September 2011), I introduced

I've been researching new, innovative applications of BI and analytics.

Agile and lean methods are a means to an end, and that end is increased capability and productivity for your teams and organizations.

Agile and lean methods are a means to an end, and that end is increased capability and productivity for your teams and organizations. This leads directly to cost savings and revenue. All too often, however, adoption and transformation initiatives fail to bring such results.