Imagine you and I are building a house without drawings or specifications, instead relying on various tradespeople to use their experience to build what we have in mind. So the concreter lays the slab where he think is best, given his experience; the plumber puts the piping where she thinks it should go. The electrician wires the house as he deems it should be, and so on.

Imagine you and I are building a house without drawings or specifications, instead relying on various tradespeople to use their experience to build what we have in mind. So the concreter lays the slab where he think is best, given his experience; the plumber puts the piping where she thinks it should go. The electrician wires the house as he deems it should be, and so on.

Personally identifiable information (PII) plays a key role and is involved within many business processes. PII is stored in an extremely large number of corporate systems and data storage repositories.

Personally identifiable information (PII) plays a key role and is involved within many business processes. PII is stored in an extremely large number of corporate systems and data storage repositories.

The idea of running IT as a business has gained much traction in recent years -- especially with the continued upsurge in all things IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Is your perimeter secure? The answer to that is simple: NO. As business has become more distributed, outsourcing has gone global, supply chains are more connected, employees have become teleworkers, customers demand better information, and so on, we have systematically punched holes into perimeter security until it now resembles Swiss cheese.

Data warehousing database vendor Greenplum has launched what the company calls its "Enterprise Data Cloud" (EDC) initiative. EDC builds on Greenplum's flagship massively parallel data warehousing database -- optimized for analytics and dynamic scalability -- and the concept of self-service provisioning.

Business leaders have an obligation to make sure that all information within the organization is adequately protected. You cannot outsource your organization's responsibility and accountability for appropriately and diligently safeguarding information that you have entrusted to third parties.

The capabilities delivered by BI technologies, which provide computational power, speed, and capacity, do not always address and resolve the issues derived from the lack of interoperability of disparate data sets.

It has become increasingly evident that companies that fail to establish adequate innovation processes are likely to suffer in the current recession. As economic conditions bite deeper into revenues from existing products, new products will not be available to replace them, and ultimately, the company will fall behind the competition.

It has become increasingly evident that companies that fail to establish adequate innovation processes are likely to suffer in the current recession. As economic conditions bite deeper into revenues from existing products, new products will not be available to replace them, and ultimately, the company will fall behind the competition.

One of the greatest strengths of agile methodologies is that exploratory techniques involving collaboration between people -- the very fabric of software development -- take center stage. At the same time, from a service-oriented point of view, rigor is needed in specifying services and the components used to implement them.

Outsourcing is no longer a novel or innovative strategy. It has evolved into just another choice a manager can make as he or she thinks about how to do more and better with less. As the industry has matured, its actors have gotten better at defining sourcing strategies, crafting deals, surviving transitions, and putting in place the capabilities to manage complex, multiyear relationships. Yet in survey after survey, we can still see significant levels of dissatisfaction, in particular with regard to the value realized after the initial cost savings:

Outsourcing is no longer a novel or innovative strategy. It has evolved into just another choice a manager can make as he or she thinks about how to do more and better with less. As the industry has matured, its actors have gotten better at defining sourcing strategies, crafting deals, surviving transitions, and putting in place the capabilities to manage complex, multiyear relationships. Yet in survey after survey, we can still see significant levels of dissatisfaction, in particular with regard to the value realized after the initial cost savings:

In his recent Advisor "Service-Oriented Agile Projects -- Contradiction or Necessity?" Cutter Senior Consultant Paul Allen wrote that "agile projects have often struggled with delivering ...

After a number of years of near-total dominance of the Internet search space by Google, there suddenly are a number of major new announcements. Microsoft, for example, has just introduced its new search engine called Bing, which is intended to be a more "semantic" search with greater focus on presenting the results to make them more relevant and useful to the user.

After a number of years of near-total dominance of the Internet search space by Google, there suddenly are a number of major new announcements. Microsoft, for example, has just introduced its new search engine called Bing, which is intended to be a more "semantic" search with greater focus on presenting the results to make them more relevant and useful to the user.

So long to the gorilla dust at GM. That’s what billionaire entrepreneur founder of EDS and ex-General Motors executive Ross Perot called the annual optimistic projections of GM executives during the 1980s, as it continued to lose market share. “When gorillas fight, they throw dust in the air to distract one another,” Perot said.

Over the past few months, we have talked with IT leadership in large and small companies. The discussion focused on how well IT is performing for their company. Following are the main points common to all the companies with which we've been involved lately:

Perhaps you remember the public service campaign from 1960s television that went something like, "It's 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?" For IT, we could rephrase it as; "It's 2009. Do you know where your data is?" You probably don't, especially if it's in the hands of your partners or outsourcers.

I've been researching the state of the art in mining social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, CNET Reviews, Epicurious, IMDb, TripAdvisor, Yahoo! Finance, Amazon, and WebMD.

I've been researching the state of the art in mining social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, CNET Reviews, Epicurious, IMDb, TripAdvisor, Yahoo! Finance, Amazon, and WebMD.

I met with several CIOs recently and discussed their approaches to cost containment. In the discussion, one made the interesting point that cost containment is merely the current crisis. CIOs have regularly faced others: innovation (last year), alignment (the year before), demonstrated value of IT (the year before that), and so forth. And, he assured us, we'll certainly have new crises next year.

This is the fifth and last of a series of Executive Updates in which I have been presenting and interpreting the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on the subject of open source Java frameworks (OSJFs).

A harsh economic recession calling for renewed cost reduction with an emphasis on tactical solution-delivery projects causes concerns over the effectiveness of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) and puts agile methodologies back in the limelight. SOA and agile are commonly seen as opposites, but opposites that don't attract.