Systematic and deliberate knowledge management (KM) of knowledge-related processes and intellectual capital (IC) assets is pursued by competent enterprises throughout the world. Its purpose is to facilitate enterprise actions to be highly effective by building, maintaining, making available, and safeguarding IC assets from operational, tactical, and strategic perspectives.

As a percentage of gross revenue, technology budgets are growing. At the same time, the contribution that technology can make to the business is expanding. The key is to identify the technology acquisition, deployment, and support strategies most likely to help you save/make money. This Executive Report outlines a framework of assessments pertaining to strategy, leadership, culture, organization, awareness, technology, metrics, and sourcing.

This Executive Report looks at common architectural titles and roles and describe what responsibilities are typically associated with those roles. Then, it looks at the skills that all architects have in common and describe 10 things that every architect can do to add value to his or her organization.

We have worked extensively with clients this year on their IT strategic plans. One way we characterize the best approach is to distinguish between the "supply" and the "demand" components of the plan. This month, we'll focus on the "supply" side and next month on the "demand" side. (Incidentally, doing an effective "demand" side of IT strategic planning is by far the more critical and least understood.

As a percentage of gross revenue, technology budgets are growing. At the same time, the contribution that technology can make to the business is expanding. The key is to identify the technology acquisition, deployment, and support strategies most likely to help you save/make money.

The accompanying Executive Report outlines an optimization audit in response to new opportunities and old pitfalls. Areas include: strategy; applications; networks; data; organization, people, and culture; metrics; benchmarks; security; and delivery.

One of the problems with the IT field is that, absent something like the model year for cars popularized by Alfred Sloan in the 1920s, IT companies have to keep coming up with new terms for old ideas. Recently, I've found myself in meetings with consultants and IT managers in which the term "metadata" has been used to allow a group of clueless participants seem with it.

This Executive Summary and its accompanying Executive Report look at common architectural titles and roles and describe what responsibilities are typically associated with those roles. Then, it explores the skills that all architects have in common and describe 10 things that every architect can do to add value to his or her organization. Not a client? Receive a complimentary copy of this report. 

With this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review we focus on the management of IT talent and look at the managerial and human resources challenges in the IT shop.

When Gabe proposed the topic of this issue of CBR to us, he asked questions such as "How do you handle sharp technical people?" and "How do you manage them when they don't play nice?" We couldn't help but think of the stereotypical geek, defined in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as "a person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept."1 That's a bit of a double-edged sword, isn't it? Valued technical skills, but not good at interacting with others.

In this article, we examine the characteristics of 'highly talented' IT workers, specifically in regard to how they are motivated and how they can be effectively (and ineffectively) managed. The observations and conclusions drawn stem from the results of this CBR survey as well as from my observations of the experiences of highly talented IT workers and conversations I've had with them over the course of my career.

This issue of CBR emerged from a conversation with people who, day in and day out, have to interact with, motivate, and manage a technical IT staff after having themselves been part of the same group. The order is a tall one for a number of reasons. The technical training these managers have received in school and the work they have done over the years have done little to prepare them to handle the people problems that they face in their managerial position. Very sharp technical people are often used to being the experts in their domain and are used to working independently.

This survey investigated the perceptions of respondents about themselves and others as managers and IT professionals. Nine percent of the 87 respondents work for organizations with more than 50,000 employees, 21% for organizations with between 5,000 and 50,000 employees, 30% for organizations with between 500 and 5,000 employees, 23% for organizations with between 50 and 500 employees, and the remaining respondents for organizations with 50 or fewer employees.

Systematic and deliberate knowledge management (KM) of knowledge-related processes and intellectual capital (IC) assets is pursued by competent enterprises throughout the world.

The concept of "knowledge management" (KM) has been around for 25 years and is known to most business practitioners. KM, as practiced by competent enterprises and discussed in this report, is defined as:

Use Cutter's business technology, security, sourcing, enterprise risk, governance, innovation, and trends expertise in your organization, and gain tools that enable you to make better short-and long-term decisions.

The project management landscape can be defined based on two variables: goal clarity and solution clarity. Allowing these variables to take on two values (clear or not clear) generates five project management lifecycle models: linear, incremental, iterative, adaptive, and extreme.

To give you a clear understanding of our journey through the contemporary world of project management, we can make a strong parallel with the idea of being a cook or a chef. You can learn to be a cook and be able to routinely follow the recipes of others, or you can learn to be a chef and be able to create recipes for cooks to follow.

IT strategy

Incessantly focusing on cheaper and faster has not made systems or organizations better. This strategy is leaving IT in a precarious position without an adequate infrastructure to address today's complex challenges.

IT strategy

Incessantly focusing on cheaper and faster has not made systems or organizations better. This strategy is leaving IT in a precarious position without an adequate infrastructure to address today's complex challenges.

IT strategy

Incessantly focusing on cheaper and faster has not made systems or organizations better. This strategy is leaving IT in a precarious position without an adequate infrastructure to address today's complex challenges.

Last week, Oracle announced two new products targeted at high-performance data warehousing applications: the HP Oracle Database Machine and the Oracle Exadata Storage Server. These products package hardware from HP with database accelerator software from Oracle to form what is essentially a high-performance data warehousing appliance.

The best way to minimize risk is to nip conflict in the bud and to turn it to an organization's advantage.