Perhaps there's still room on your reading list for one more title. Even if there's not, this is one you want to consider for your bookshelf. Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage, published by Addison-Wesley, is an essential reference for anybody involved in database design.

Over the past few years, I have been working with companies to alleviate the risks they face in creating business-IT alignment. From the plethora of publications available today on this topic, I recognize that most IT organizations are working quite diligently to achieve an optimal business-IT alignment as a measure toward their cost-cutting efforts. In my opinion, these efforts are not being exerted to create mere harmony or coexistence between business and IT organizations.

The current trend whereby organizations are seeking to extend business intelligence (BI) capabilities to increasing numbers of end users (including those residing beyond the corporate firewall) has placed renewed emphasis on a frequently underestimated but hugely important aspect of the data warehouse lifecycle: managing the data warehouse/BI environment.

Data warehouse/BI administration and management involves a number of tasks, including the following:

I was talking recently with a colleague who is involved in a business performance management initiative. The subject quickly turned to one of the most important challenges associated with such an effort: identifying key performance indicators (KPIs). This Advisor summarizes what we discussed.

Imagine for the moment that you are about to drive across the US from Los Angeles to Boston. 1 You have mapped out in detail the costs, the resources needed, the time, the roads, and even some of the places you want to visit along the way: Las Vegas, Mount Rushmore and the Badlands, Nashville, and Chicago. You expect the trip to take 10 days and cost US $1,500. You leave Los Angeles and head east, with a plan to be in South Dakota by day four.

In this business, if you put enough opinions on record, sooner or later you will wind up with egg all over your face. Just this past June, it was my turn: no sooner had my Executive Update "WinFS: Integrated Storage for Windows" (Vol. 9, No. 11) seen the light of day, than WinFS was no more. It had ceased to be. It was an ex-project. And just when everything had seemed to be going so well ...

Business rules management (BRM) products are software tools that enable organizations to capture business rules and model, deploy, and maintain business rules applications. Although there is no hard definition as to just what exactly constitutes a BRM product, there are some basic capabilities that a BRM product should provide.

At the beginning of any software project, development teams have a set of constraints to work with and choices to make. Many of these choices are code-related.

In making these choices, many questions arise. How do we choose how and when to test the code? How, and to what extent, can we keep it simple and clear? How do we choose major frameworks and tools? How do we choose a development language and development environment? Which choices are most important, and how do they affect each other?

Organizations are under the constant threat of disaster and must implement an effective business continuity plan (BCP) that includes pre-incident preparation, analysis, mitigation, and recovery. When properly implemented, BCPs minimize business interruptions, allowing for seamless continuation of operations.

Organizations are under the constant threat of disaster and must implement an effective business continuity plan (BCP) that includes pre-incident preparation, analysis, mitigation, and recovery. When properly implemented, BCPs minimize business interruptions, allowing for seamless continuation of operations.

Successful application development and maintenance (AD/M) outsourcing relationships are contractually governed by a series of measures that monitor the performance and level of service provided by the outsourcing vendor.

Successful application development and maintenance (AD/M) outsourcing relationships are contractually governed by a series of measures that monitor the performance and level of service provided by the outsourcing vendor.

The open source software development movement brought the IT world to attention with the creation of the Linux platform. An "innovation ecology" grew out of developers' enthusiasm for the possibilities of this technology as thousands of code jocks around the world contributed innovations and functionality to the Linux OS and Linux-based applications.

The open source software development movement brought the IT world to attention with the creation of the Linux platform. An "innovation ecology" grew out of developers' enthusiasm for the possibilities of this technology as thousands of code jocks around the world contributed innovations and functionality to the Linux OS and Linux-based applications.

The open source software development movement brought the IT world to attention with the creation of the Linux platform. An "innovation ecology" grew out of developers' enthusiasm for the possibilities of this technology as thousands of code jocks around the world contributed innovations and functionality to the Linux OS and Linux-based applications.

Early in my career, I worked for one of the leading authorities in the field of linear programming (LP) [1]. This person had developed one of the earliest LP codes while he was working for an oil company. Oil companies figured out early on how to use LP to optimize their refinery operations, so LP was a big deal for them.

A friend of mine asked me recently whether I knew of any list of rules for project managers that he could review to help him with his next book. I pointed him to the list of 100 rules from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Project Manager Jerry Madden, but it got me thinking about what might be on my own list and why.

As I write this, hurricane experts at Colorado State University have announced a revision to their May 2006 prediction that nine hurricanes could potentially threaten the US to "only" seven, three of which are likely to be severe. This forecast is down from the five severe hurricanes that they had predicted in May. A cooler tropical Atlantic Ocean and a warming eastern Pacific are the reasons they give for this revised forecast.

As I write this, hurricane experts at Colorado State University have announced a revision to their May 2006 prediction that nine hurricanes could potentially threaten the US to "only" seven, three of which are likely to be severe. This forecast is down from the five severe hurricanes that they had predicted in May. A cooler tropical Atlantic Ocean and a warming eastern Pacific are the reasons they give for this revised forecast.

In the barrage of advice on how to successfully manage a business process offshoring project, a crucial piece of advice can be lost: manage the project as if it were a capital investment requiring a business case, including a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis.

In the barrage of advice on how to successfully manage a business process offshoring project, a crucial piece of advice can be lost: manage the project as if it were a capital investment requiring a business case, including a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis.

In the field of enterprise architecture, many architects are very critical of John Zachman's well-known framework. A number of extensions have been proposed for the framework (see, for example, the work of Cutter Senior Consultant Ken Orr, including his Executive Report "Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling").

When are you supposed to build an economic value model to justify a proposed information technology investment? Whenever your boss says to.

That's the obvious answer. A subtler one rests in building a decisionmaking framework that helps guide organizations in determining the appropriate occasions to undertake an investment assessment.

If the year ended today, I'd be inclined to say that probably the two most significant events that have taken place concerning the BI world both have to do with Microsoft. The first was Microsoft buying BI and analysis tools vendor ProClarity Corporation back in April. The second was Microsoft announcing plans in June that it intends to market a business performance management application -- Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 -- based on a combination of ProClarity's and Microsoft's own BI technologies.

A friend of mine runs a company that provides remote back-up and recovery. It's a very nice little company that makes money and provides a valuable service to its customers. About a year ago the company piloted its technology at my university. The results were great. They quoted us a price of around US $14 per month per user for automatic, almost limitless back-up with guaranteed recovery of any file within hours. Good stuff.