These five areas define the decisions that must be made as the business technology field fundamentally changes from the world we understood just five years ago. Is there some urgency here? Absolutely, because the nature of the changes we've been tracking is so profound that a misstep here could cost a great deal of time, effort and money.

Crime and fraud on the Internet, once pitched mainly toward individuals, now represent significant and increasing risk to organizations with a digital presence. The risk is aggravated by such factors as personal use of corporate computers, loss of laptops, insecure wireless networks, indefinite retention of personal information, poorly thought-out backup and archiving measures, and offshoring.

The goal of portfolio management within an IT environment is to help improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of IT efforts within an organization. You do this by ensuring that all projects and existing systems are visible, planned for, and aligned to the goals of your organization.

Recently, I was in Tampa and Chicago during the same week to speak at data management and business process conferences. It gave me a chance to find out what some of the best and brightest in the business were forecasting for the future of technology. I would imagine that all told there were more than 1,000 technology folks at these conferences.

Recently, I was in Tampa and Chicago during the same week to speak at data management and business process conferences. It gave me a chance to find out what some of the best and brightest in the business were forecasting for the future of technology. I would imagine that all told there were more than 1,000 technology folks at these conferences.

Recently, I was in Tampa and Chicago during the same week to speak at data management and business process conferences. It gave me a chance to find out what some of the best and brightest in the business were forecasting for the future of technology. I would imagine that all told there were more than 1,000 technology folks at these conferences.

It started innocently enough. A US educational institution (which we shall call WhoU) was looking to update and standardize the PII of current and former students in its electronic database and upgrade its software to automate much of this process on a going-forward basis.

It started innocently enough. A US educational institution (which we shall call WhoU) was looking to update and standardize the PII of current and former students in its electronic database and upgrade its software to automate much of this process on a going-forward basis.

This Advisor is the first in a series that will examine the role of the product manager in an IT business along with some of the alternatives for defining that role and its ultimate contribution to the corporation.

While the notion of core/context capabilities is central to the whole capability-driven approach, it is sometimes quite difficult to take a strictly binary view. Graduating capabilities in terms of their degree of commoditization can help, and it is possible to use several classifications along a spectrum from high to low commoditization.

A schism has been brewing between traditional RDBMS (relational database management system) fans and proponents of the MapReduce data-crunching technology pioneered by Google and made popular by the open source Hadoop framework.

In recent months, I've been casually tracking, on a nearly daily basis, the latest generation of Web-based mashups through a community portal I configured using a mashup of Joomla! and Yahoo! Pipes called MashUpUniverse.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

— L.P. Hartley, opening lines of The Go-Between (1953)

The key technical barrier to capitalizing software components is our insistence on defining them as use-as-is, encapsulated executables.

Capital assets are long-term investments whose ROIs are expected to more than repay their capital. Conventional software components rarely satisfy this definition. A prominent reason is that our industry demands components be used as is, much like physical parts. Yet unlimited malleability is software's greatest asset (and its greatest liability).

Capital assets are long-term investments whose ROIs are expected to more than repay their capital. Conventional software components rarely satisfy this definition. A prominent reason is that our industry demands components be used as is, much like physical parts. Yet unlimited malleability is software's greatest asset (and its greatest liability).

The "open revolution" is now the mainstream. In addition to traditional markets for software and content, individuals and firms can also now look to the enormous "commons" of information and software that is openly available.

In addition to traditional markets for software and content, individuals and firms can also now look to the enormous "commons" of information and software that is openly available. The accompanying Executive Report looks at what's available, discusses how firms might use these goods, and offers some guidelines to bear in mind during the assessment and adoption process.

Is there any opportunity for organizations seeking to benefit from their customers' use of social networks? How can organizations take advantage of the explosive growth of social networking? Here the answer is not so simple. For this reason, we focus this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review on this important and timely topic: organizational uses and opportunities in social networking.

Given all the buzz surrounding Facebook and Twitter, social networking applications have the potential to be viewed as just the latest Web 2.0 fad. However, social networking applications are neither new nor a fad. Internet discussion groups, which have been in existence for more than two decades, were one of the first online social networking applications. The Usenet discussion group system was founded as an experiment in 1979; today, it exists as Google Groups and includes a searchable archive of more than 700 million postings dating back 20 years.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks are very hot right now; however, most of the existing research has been done on these social networks with an eye toward consumer-oriented usage. Corresponding research from the enterprise side is lacking. Therefore, this month's CBR survey tackles this perspective, and this article summarizes what we found regarding social networks in the enterprise.

This issue of CBR focuses on a very important and timely topic: how to unlock the value of social networking. The perspective we take is that of the organization, not the individual. While online communities are almost as old as the Internet, there is no available blueprint for organizations that wish to take advantage of the seemingly unending stream of new community-enabling tools -- from Facebook to LinkedIn to Tweeter or TripIt.

This survey examines how organizations use social networks both to support interactions among employees and/or to support interactions between the organization and its customers or other business partners. Fifty-nine percent of the 119 respondents come from organizations headquartered or based in North America, 20% from organizations in Europe, 14% from organizations in Asia/Australia/Pacific, and the remainder from organizations in other regions.

Quite simply, the Web has a huge impact on our personal and professional lives. It will continue to do so, becoming the dominant platform for everything from communication to business transaction processing. Within a decade, the personal/professional merger will be complete with virtually no distinctions between what we do to live and what we do to work.