Everyone wants to get a slice of the social networking market. Social networks provide opportunities for large IT enterprises, innovative startups, third-party developers, IT professionals, and venture capitalists. IT businesses now have many new social network-inspired opportunities, some of which are yet to be explored, along different avenues, as follows:

I've run across a writer who has wonderfully smart things to say about art and biology that I think offer a lot of food for thought about innovation.

I've run across a writer who has wonderfully smart things to say about art and biology that I think offer a lot of food for thought about innovation.

A client asks about methods to increase the trust between IT and business managers and staff. It seems the relationship is currently broken: business managers don't trust IT, and the feeling is mutual.

About a year ago, I was consulting with a client around the organization's SOA offering and its relationship to enterprise architecture. The client, a software provider, had its chief architect in the meeting, and the architect was trying to convince me of the value of the company's solution.

The most popular Web 2.0 technologies used by organizations to support their business performance management initiatives are wikis and social networks. This finding comes from 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.

American businessman Warren Buffet once said that "it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

In my last Advisor (see "How to Increase Productive Velocity, Part I," 17 April 2008), I had collected strategies for managers and domain experts to make their agile team run faster. This second article in the series is devoted to measures suitable for the development team.

Discussions surrounding risk management for the last decade have taken on the duality of risk, expressed as threat or opportunity.

Discussions surrounding risk management for the last decade have taken on the duality of risk, expressed as threat or opportunity.

With high gasoline prices, an increasing number of organizations are revisiting their travel policies and about employees working from home. The pressures of high fuel costs, increasing travel time, and higher travel costs all argue for more remote (technology-mediated) meetings. The current buzzword for this is "telepresence," but "teleconferencing" is just as appropriate.

With high gasoline prices, an increasing number of organizations are revisiting their travel policies and about employees working from home. The pressures of high fuel costs, increasing travel time, and higher travel costs all argue for more remote (technology-mediated) meetings. The current buzzword for this is "telepresence," but "teleconferencing" is just as appropriate.

With high gasoline prices, an increasing number of organizations are revisiting their travel policies and about employees working from home. The pressures of high fuel costs, increasing travel time, and higher travel costs all argue for more remote (technology-mediated) meetings. The current buzzword for this is "telepresence," but "teleconferencing" is just as appropriate.

What the business intelligence (BI) architecture will look like in the future depends on the business drivers for BI as well as the direction the technology is going to take. Data within an organization are increasing exponentially, and the demand for real-time analytics is greater than ever. The process of standardizing and integrating enterprise data in a single data warehouse (DW) is an ever-increasing challenge given the high data growth and rapidly evolving business processes in organizations.

What the business intelligence (BI) architecture will look like in the future depends on the business drivers for BI as well as the direction the technology is going to take. Data within an organization are increasing exponentially, and the demand for real-time analytics is greater than ever. The process of standardizing and integrating enterprise data in a single data warehouse (DW) is an ever-increasing challenge given the high data growth and rapidly evolving business processes in organizations.

In my last Advisor (see "Making Planning Predictability One of Your Principles," 14 May 2008), I spoke about the importance of predictability of plans, especially as implementation proceeds.

I've been thinking about the software-plus-service model, where a vendor offers online (hosted) software components that integrate with the vendor's software installed onsite at the end-user organization (i.e., the customer). Microsoft is pushing this approach in response to on-demand offerings from Google and other providers.

Vertica Systems is offering an on-demand version of its high-performance, columnar analytic database hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform.

Technologists love technology and assume that others share this affinity. Unfortunately, most nontechnology executives and managers feel quite differently about technology. Most of them see it as a means to an end, and we all know what the end looks like. Therefore, we also know that there are key messages in which we should frame our discussions about the business value of technology.

We know that people are our most valuable resource, but we seem to forget this too easily. Recently, I was with an executive team of a high-technology company, and the team was struggling with a string of late-to-market development projects. Finally, the CEO got up and proposed yet another rewiring of the organization chart. I have seen this scenario repeated too many times.

Humans, like other primates, are fundamentally social animals. We congregate at rock concerts, football stadiums, and jazz clubs and through churches, golf clubs, and alumni associations. We've converted broadcast media into meeting places, with reality TV and hosted call-in talk shows.

Humans, like other primates, are fundamentally social animals. We congregate at rock concerts, football stadiums, and jazz clubs and through churches, golf clubs, and alumni associations. We've converted broadcast media into meeting places, with reality TV and hosted call-in talk shows.

Telecommuting was one of those gee-whiz possibilities that emerged when the Internet took off 10 years ago and the existence of pervasive, reliable connectivity suggested remote work scenarios in workers' imaginations. Since then, telecommuting has waxed and waned in popularity, but a new motivation having nothing to do with IT might ignite an operational and technical reexploration of the subject amongst managers. This Executive Update is designed to support managers in that exercise.

Telecommuting was one of those gee-whiz possibilities that emerged when the Internet took off 10 years ago and the existence of pervasive, reliable connectivity suggested remote work scenarios in workers' imaginations. Since then, telecommuting has waxed and waned in popularity, but a new motivation having nothing to do with IT might ignite an operational and technical reexploration of the subject amongst managers. This Executive Update is designed to support managers in that exercise.