My friend and colleague on the Cutter Business Technology Council, Lou Mazzucchelli, recently sent around an article that was posted on Ars Technica titled "The promise of Google Apps includes a shrinking IT staff," by Nate Anderson. Anderson writes:

My friend and colleague on the Cutter Business Technology Council, Lou Mazzucchelli, recently sent around an article that was posted on Ars Technica titled "The promise of Google Apps includes a shrinking IT staff," by Nate Anderson. Anderson writes:

The services area is about both saving money and making money. The key message here is about variety. Whereas just a decade ago there was a limited set of well-understood service packages -- help desk support, data center management, and customer service centers -- today, there's a complete range of services provided by a large number of skilled vendors.

The services area is about both saving money and making money. The key message here is about variety. Whereas just a decade ago there was a limited set of well-understood service packages -- help desk support, data center management, and customer service centers -- today, there's a complete range of services provided by a large number of skilled vendors.

In my last Advisor (see "EAD: The Architecture of the Customer Experience, Part 5," 7 May 2008), I explained how customer interviews, observations, and surveys could help firms understand which parts of the customer experience are in need of repair.

I really love maps. I'm something of a map freak. When I was a kid, my folks got me an encyclopedia that had a volume called "Places and People," and I spent whole summers browsing the maps and pictures, trying to get the relationships of those maps and the rest of the globe clear in my mind.

Organizations are applying a range of analytic techniques to support their business performance management initiatives, according to a January 2008 Cutter Consortium survey of 101 end-user organizations worldwide, which was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing business performance management technologies and techniques.

Every company needs to establish policies to provide the necessary governance for legal, financial, security, and basic operational reasons. For the most part, employees do their best to follow these rules, or they try to work through "the system" to change them if necessary.

If money grew on trees, companies would have no need for IT investment prioritization. In good times and bad, financial and other resources are not there simply for the plucking and, indeed, might prove quite scarce. In these situations, managers must rely on tools to sequence the order in which investments are made. What technology should we invest in today, tomorrow, or next quarter? Methodologies exist to answer these questions.

In a world of unlimited resources, managers would have no need to prioritize investment choices. Unfortunately, constraints of all kinds surround us. Organizations facing limitations in everything except the wish list of technology proposals seeking capital are hungry for ways to sequence investments in acknowledgement of these constraints.

A common practice for large enterprises is a process known as "optimization audits." These audits are designed to assess and recommend opportunities for making money or saving money with technology by looking at areas like applications, data, networks, organization, leadership, governance, and architecture.

Modeling your enterprise architecture in a consistent, concise, and precise manner so that all of the stakeholders' views are addressed can be a formidable task. Making that architectural model readily available and understandable to those who need it can be even more challenging.

There's a common thread in all of the current hot topics concerning enterprise architecture (from business-IT alignment to agile development to architectural conformance): they are all impossible without the timely availability of knowledge. The reason is simple; just ask yourself the following questions:

In 2006, Cutter EA Practice Director Mike Rosen and I (Jeroen van Tyn) wrote an Executive Report that made the case for enterprise business architecture as requirements for enterprise architecture (EA) in general and for the use of business patterns as a way of articulating enterprise business architecture.1 In an E-Mail Advisor earlier this year, I presented a thumbnail case study of how discovering and articulating a business pattern had a significant impact on executive-level enterprise business decisions.

In this issue we look at forecasting and forecasting techniques in the business and organizational setting.

In this issue we look at forecasting and forecasting techniques in the business and organizational setting.

Organizations make enormous investments based upon forecasts they produce. Forecasted demand for new or existing product lines influences operational, logistical, marketing, retail, and many other decisions in an organization's value chain. While effective forecasting practices can inform a range of activities from daily operations to strategic initiatives, forecasting researchers and practitioners often lament about the gap between forecasting theory and practice.

Organizations make enormous investments based upon forecasts they produce. Forecasted demand for new or existing product lines influences operational, logistical, marketing, retail, and many other decisions in an organization's value chain. While effective forecasting practices can inform a range of activities from daily operations to strategic initiatives, forecasting researchers and practitioners often lament about the gap between forecasting theory and practice.

Forecasting applies to a multitude of businesses; let's start off by looking at a couple of examples of how the practice is currently being used.

Forecasting applies to a multitude of businesses; let's start off by looking at a couple of examples of how the practice is currently being used.

This installment of Cutter Benchmark Review represents a departure from our standard approach and focus. However, with the proliferation of available data in modern organizations, the role of IS professionals in aiding the forecasting function will only increase. This is an opportunity to provide further value to the organization, and for this reason we thought that benchmarking forecasting practices and asking our experts to comment on the results would be valuable to our broad readership.

This installment of Cutter Benchmark Review represents a departure from our standard approach and focus. However, with the proliferation of available data in modern organizations, the role of IS professionals in aiding the forecasting function will only increase. This is an opportunity to provide further value to the organization, and for this reason we thought that benchmarking forecasting practices and asking our experts to comment on the results would be valuable to our broad readership.

This survey examined the judgmental or quantitative forecasting methods used in 99 organizations, 51% of which are headquartered in North America; of the remainder, 21% are headquartered in Europe, 14% in Asia, 7% in Australia/Pacific, and 7% in South America or the Middle East.

This survey examined the judgmental or quantitative forecasting methods used in 99 organizations, 51% of which are headquartered in North America; of the remainder, 21% are headquartered in Europe, 14% in Asia, 7% in Australia/Pacific, and 7% in South America or the Middle East.

Business intelligence (BI) and enterprise search are converging, and vendors now offer products that combine the ease of use of search engines with the reporting and analysis capabilities of BI tools.