Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

When last we met, I went on about language and the sloppy and obfuscating use thereof ("Reflections on Innovation -- Part IV: The Care and Feeding of Language").

I've said for some time now that one of the more important developments that will lead to greater use of Hadoop and MapReduce in the enterprise is integration of the technologies with relational databases and SQL-based BI tools.

Certain business situations require analytics to monitor operations as close as possible to real time. However, delays caused by moving data in the repository for its analytical treatment are usually too long to enable companies to respond efficiently to queries -- or to take actions in real time. One of today's biggest challenges is the need to act efficiently amid the huge volumes of constantly changing information.

Certain business situations require analytics to monitor operations as close as possible to real time.

There were two interesting IT-related news stories the past few weeks that caught my attention. The first was the news that the market value of Apple had exceeded US $500 billion -- only the fifth company to have achieved that milestone.

For most corporations, killing old projects is probably as important as approving new projects. Most of the resources of a corporation are used for regular operational work, which, it is hoped, produces a profit that will allow a small percentage of resources to be used for new development, such as new products and new infrastructure -- including IT. It is critically important for those resources used on IT projects that they pay off in improved efficiency of operations and increased revenue and profits.

Over the last year, discussions with the CIO around social applications have changed. I did some research in June of 2011 that showed that 45% of the CIOs we interviewed thought IT was in control of social programs in the enterprise.